The clock is ticking for seven states to figure out how they’ll share dwindling water in the Colorado River for the foreseeable future.
In a meeting at the Utah State Capitol Thursday, the river’s four Upper Basin state commissioners further embraced the idea of a “divorce” with their Lower Basin neighbors — an idea also floated at a meeting in eastern Utah last week, as reported by Fox 13.
“Today we stand on the brink of system failure,” said Becky Mitchell, the commissioner for Colorado, “we also stand on the precipice of a major decision point.”
Despite a few wet winters, storage in Lake Powell and Lake Mead — the nation’s largest reservoirs — are teetering close to the dangerously low levels they hit in 2023.
“We have to deal with reality,” said Gene Shawcroft, Utah’s commissioner. “We don’t have a choice.”
Federal managers are preparing to repeat the emergency measures they took in 2022, like draining Flaming Gorge reservoir to prop up Lake Powell. The priority is to ensure the mega-reservoir stays full enough to continue releasing water to Lower Basin States and generating hydropower.
Meanwhile, the states that rely on the Colorado River for their water supply — Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and California — are up against a 2026 deadline, when the current agreements on how to share the river lapse.
But negotiations between the four Upper Basin states, which includes Utah, Colorado, Wyoming and New Mexico, have been in a standstill with the remaining three Lower Basin states for more than a year.
The Interior Department’s acting assistant secretary for water and science, Scott Cameron, has met with leadership in the seven states that use Colorado River water since April, working to broker a deal.
“We all have to live in the physical world as it is,” he said, “not as we might hope it will be.”
On Thursday, Cameron presented water managers with a deadline. The Interior Department plans to release a draft environmental impact statement evaluating different alternatives for the river’s future in December, which will then open to public comment.
The department will make its final decision on how to proceed by June of 2026.
“The goal is to essentially parachute in a seven-state deal as the preferred alternative,” Cameron said.
For that to work, the states will need to reach an agreement by Nov. 11. By Feb. 14, they’ll need to hand over the details of their plan.
Whatever the states decide on, Cameron reminded commissioners, will likely take an act of Congress and new policy adopted by most of the affected states’ legislatures.
“They’ve been put on notice,” Cameron said. “Clearly, they would prefer more to have more than a couple of weeks’ notice to get a bill passed.”
The federal government is also working to engage around 30 tribal nations located in the river basin, which having varying water rights and water infrastructure.
The idea of framing the future relationship of the river users as a “divorce” was first pitched by the Lower Basin states, Mitchell said.
Under that proposal, the Upper Basin states would release water from Lake Powell based on the average natural flow measured at Lee’s Ferry, a point just downstream of the reservoir and upstream of both Grand Canyon National Park and Lake Mead.
“If done correctly,” Mitchell said, “it should provide the opportunity for the Upper and Lower basins to manage themselves, with the only real point of agreement being the Powell release.”
And like a divorce, the two parties should be careful to not let legal spats block progress, the commissioners said.
The proposal could eliminate the Upper Basin’s obligation to send a set amount to the Lower Basin states each year. Under the original 1922 compact, the upper states agreed to deliver 7.5 million acre-feet annually. But under the “divorce” agreement, releases would be based on what’s available in the system.
“The idea is that the Upper Basin and Lower Basin will agree on how much water is released,” said Chuck Cullom, executive director of the Upper Colorado River Commission, in a phone interview. “Therefore, we don’t have to fight about everything else.”
More than 40 million people in the United States, Mexico and across multiple tribes depend on water from the Colorado River.
As the climate across the basin warms and snowpack has become less reliable, the Colorado River’s volume has also declined.
It has raised contention between states, where water managers in the Upper Basin say they have taken real-time cuts to grapple with shortages while Lower Basin states — which have senior water rights — have consumption that consistently exceeds what’s available.
“Reductions in the Upper Basin should not just simply translate to more water to the Lower Basin,” Shawcroft said. “We ought to be able to use that water within our states to help satisfy our own shortages.”
Utah Gov. Spencer Cox issued an emergency drought declaration this spring for 17 of the state’s 29 counties, most of which lie in the Colorado River watershed.
Lake Powell sat at 33% full as of this week.