The wait is over.
A new plan for the Colorado River has arrived, and a new dawn in river management awaits — one of collaboration, conservation, innovation and mutual responsibility.
Just kidding.
Last week, the U.S. Department of the Interior released its “record of decision” in the years-long process to develop new management guidelines for the dwindling Colorado River and especially its largest reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, which sit at record-low elevations.
The record of decision is a sweeping document that touches everything from reservoir operations to tribal water rights. It lays out a new framework for navigating river management: a 10-year plan with two-year check-ins during which the states and other parties can come back to the table.
The big takeaway is the volume of cuts the federal government says are necessary to protect the river‘s infrastructure: Up to 3 million acre-feet, depending on future hydrology, and all from the Lower Colorado River Basin states of California, Nevada and especially Arizona.
Cuts of this volume would be “draconian,” as some critics have put it, and unprecedented in the modern life of the river. Arizona‘s share of the river is about 2.8 million-acre-feet a year, and the worst cuts could not only drive the Central Arizona Project canals to mud, challenging basic assumptions about where our water will come from and how much it will cost, but even affect higher priority users in irrigation districts and on-river cities.
Even short of these cuts, we‘re looking at a new era of river governance, with little trust between parties and little hope of agreeing to the kind of long-term, 20-year plans that governed the river in the past.
There is a caveat to that dire news: The three Lower Basin states are in the process of drafting an agreement amongst themselves to share the cuts, meaning California, the basin’s largest user, would step out of line to stave off the decimation of Arizona’s Central Arizona Project water, which holds low priority relative to other uses in the basin.
Even under that plan — presuming it‘s not derailed by Nevada‘s recently announced lawsuit against the federal government — Arizona is still looking at 760,000 acre-feet in cuts a year.
So, a new era is here. But we‘ll be facing a host of old problems, with higher stakes than ever.
Era of shortage
It’s perhaps worth reminding folks that the basin arrived at this point in part because, after the better part of three years, the seven states of the basin (the three lower states of Arizona, Nevada and California and the four upper states of New Mexico, Utah, Colorado and Wyoming) could not agree on a plan to manage the river into the next two decades.
The large, economically productive Lower Basin states recognized that, as the main users of the river historically, they would have to accept cuts. They also maintained, however, that the comparatively small and rural Upper Basin contingent should have to sacrifice some of its Colorado River allocation as well.
The Upper Basin has chafed at this suggestion, with its officials responding that the northerly states had already had to swallow reduced Colorado River allocations in the form of diminished snowpack in the Rockies.
After years of negotiations and numerous blown deadlines, neither side could get past the basic question of exactly how much water each division of the basin was entitled to in times of shortage.
So, even though negotiations officially remained open, it became clear that the federal government would have to create its own plan in order to have new guidelines in place by the start of the “water year” in October.
That plan became the record of decision.
Reactions to the federal plan in the state have been mixed.
On one hand, it leaves room for incorporation of the Lower Basin shortage sharing plan, which would see Arizona make about 760,000 acre-feet in annual reductions over the next two years as its neighboring states step out of the priority line to share some of the cuts in exchange for the expansion of a Lake Mead water banking program.
On the other hand, the most severe cuts that the federal plan contemplates could wipe out the Central Arizona Project and even dip into the allocations of some higher-priority agricultural and on-river users. And the feds don‘t require any cuts from the Upper Basin, one of the key sticking points in negotiations up to this point.
Plus, the three-state Lower Basin deal lasts just two years. After that, barring a new agreement, we’re looking down the barrel of a grim reality — not just for the river but for Arizonans.
And what kind of security do these sacrifices produce? It‘s hard to say, Kathryn Sorensen, a water policy expert at ASU, told the Agenda.
“I don’t know that we will know the answer to that until the spring,” she said. “If El Niño bails us out, then yes, it‘ll be enough. And if heaven forbid snowpack is anywhere near as bad as it was last year, then it absolutely will not be.”
Experts estimate the river needs between 2-and-4 million acre-feet in ongoing cuts to reach net sustainability.
“If this is going to be a permanent situation, then permanently that much demand needs to be retired, not annually conserved at a cost,” Cynthia Campbell, another ASU water expert, said.
An era of renegotiation
Under the federal government’s plan, the states would return to the table every two years to renegotiate.
In theory, this allows for the seven states to find long-delayed consensus and decide how to share the river without federal intervention. But it took the states about three years to come up with an (unfinished) two-year plan.
Given the failure of the states to reach such an agreement in the past, what this really seems to mean is constant negotiations over the next 10 years. Based on the time that it took to reach the current plan, negotiations for the 2029-2030 operating guidelines should have started sometime last year. It’s a tough timeline.
That means constant uncertainty — and of all the risks that shortage poses to farmers and industry and developers and workers and everyday residents, uncertainty is perhaps the greatest.
And even the future of the three-state deal is uncertain, especially with the news that Nevada is suing the feds over their plan.
Between the court case and other hurdles, like approval from the Arizona Legislature, “the ink won‘t be dry on this deal before potentially it gets blown up because the hydrology blows us up come March,” Campbell said.
According to most recent federal projections, we could “cross the Rubicon” in Lake Powell by that point, she said, meaning the reservoir drops low enough to trigger cascading cuts to the Lower Basin.
Constant negotiations also leave room for constant lawsuits.
Complex and time-consuming litigation is nothing new in the basin — the Supreme Court case Arizona v. California which determined river allocations for those two states, among a host of other issues, took more than 60 years to reach uncertain closure.
But the failure of the states to reach consensus doesn’t bode well for staying out of court. Indeed, we’re already heading in that direction.
The state of Nevada this week fired the opening salvo in litigation that could consume the Colorado River Basin, asking a judge to halt implementation of its new guidelines.
“Under the proposed plan issued by the Department of the Interior, southern Nevada could lose more than 70 percent of its already meager Colorado River allocation while the Upper Basin states ... are not required to contribute a drop,” Nevada Governor Joe Lombardo said in a press release.
The suit, filed in federal court in Las Vegas, alleges the federal plan for the Colorado is arbitrary and capricious, that it violates the 1922 Colorado River Compact and other key pieces of river law, and that the department failed to consider viable alternatives that would lead to less severe cuts, among other causes of action.
Any of the three Lower Basin states could probably mount the same case against those cuts — and there has certainly been preparations made for a lawsuit from Arizona — but Nevada was first to the courthouse. For now, Arizona is keeping its powder dry, and state officials have been circumspect about exactly what would motivate them to sue, even as they accuse the federal government of ignoring the 1922 Colorado River Compact.
“We’ll proceed with however we think we need to proceed,” Brenda Burman, the general manager of the Central Arizona Project, said at a meeting of river stakeholders in Arizona this week.
Arizona officials said the Lower Basin states are still on the same page about the shortage-sharing agreement. But the lawsuit no doubt adds an additional layer of complication to the years-long process of developing new guidelines for managing the river.
The era of self-reliance, the era of responsibility?
The failure of the seven states to reach an agreement — and the apparent failure of the feds to develop a plan that local officials find fair and legal — is leaving some in Arizona with the feeling that we better figure out our problems alone.
“The people of Arizona deserve an Arizona solution,” Sandy Fabritz, the director of water strategy at mining giant Freeport-McMoRan, said. “We cannot continue to be reliant on a federal government. We cannot continue to be reliant on anybody but ourselves going forward in the long term.”
Numerous stakeholders at the committee meeting this week said something to the same effect: The federal government is clearly prioritizing the Upper Basin over the Lower Basin, so what can we do if we can’t count on its help?
There are some clues in the Lower Basin deal, which shows some genuine goodwill on the part of California in exchange for the expansion of a water banking program in Lake Mead that it makes use of more than any other state. And plans for developing an exchange for desalinated water from California and Mexico are also in the works.
We’re also seeing some self-reliance on the part of individual cities and water districts. Cities like Phoenix and Tucson say they’re planning for the future by tapping groundwater, developing intercity water exchanges, advanced water purification systems and other plans for weathering shortage.
In other words, the era of basin-wide agreements may give way to the era of short-term, bilateral agreements between individual states or even smaller units of government.
These future-looking strategies, however, are difficult to scale without incurring significant costs. At the ARC meeting this week, committee members noted that if the feds want Arizona to sacrifice its Colorado River water, they should also fund new water supplies and infrastructures.
“The federal government has made a choice to place all of this burden exclusively on the Lower Basin, and choices have consequences,” City of Phoenix water manager Max Wilson said. “And part of that consequence is, are they going to be part of funding the billions and billions of dollars of infrastructure it is going to take to withstand the harm that they are causing to the Lower Basin?”
But the new era of the Colorado River probably means greater consumer cost, anyway, as utilities price in scarcity and new infrastructural projects.
“The thing I keep trying to tell people is, in the Colorado River Basin, we are not running out of water,” ASU water law professor Rhett Larson said at a conference last year, to resurface a quote we return to time and time again. “We are running out of cheap water.”
Politicians in Arizona have also proven liable to get in the way of the state’s self reliance.
For example, the GOP-majority Legislature and Democratic executive have so far failed to see eye-to-eye on a comprehensive groundwater reform package despite multiple sessions of attempts and some half-convincing reports of progress.
Republican lawmakers and their allies in the development community have also challenged administrative rules from the executive designed to curtail groundwater pumping and put up sideboards on exurban growth in court. These kinds of protections are essential if Arizona wants to sustain growth with a much smaller share of Colorado River water than it’s become accustomed to, but Republican lawmakers and other opponents say they place an unconstitutional burden on development.
So, we are entering a new era. But it‘s an era that, in its novelty, is exposing some very old challenges and contradictions in the basin.
“Back in the early 1920s, you could stick a bunch of old white guys in a room, and over the course of time, they hashed an agreement that ultimately proved fallible,” Kyle Roerink, the executive director of the Great Basin Water Network, an environmentally-minded Nevada non-profit, told us. “You fast forward a century, you stick a bunch of water buffaloes in a room when there‘s no water, and they can‘t come up with an agreement. Then, you get major problems. So I think we‘ve not only exposed weaknesses in in the system, we‘ve exposed how ill prepared we are for 21st century aridity.”