Colorado River talks hit crunch time as deadline from Trump administration looms

The clock is ticking down to a federal deadline Tuesday for California and six other Western states to reach the broad strokes of a deal portioning out supplies from the parched Colorado River.

Officials at the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the federal stewards for the river under the Department of the Interior, have threatened to impose their own plan if the states can’t agree how to manage the river after 2026, when the river’s current rulebook expires.

Dire projections that another dry year could send the basin’s major reservoirs plummeting to alarmingly low levels have ramped up the urgency, and the tensions.

But, after two years of fraught negotiations, the states remain at an impasse. Those in the river’s lower basin — California, Arizona, and Nevada — are clashing with Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico upstream. A key point of contention is how much each basin must scale back their use of the overtapped river as climate change further squeezes supplies.

“We’ve been in a holding pattern, and we need to land this plane by Tuesday,” J.B. Hamby, California’s chief negotiator as chairman of the Colorado River Board of California, told CalMatters.

California’s dependence on the Colorado River raises the stakes. The state takes more than half of the power generated at Lake Mead’s Hoover Dam, and more water from the main stem than any other in the basin. Half a million acres of alfalfa, winter vegetables and other crops in the Imperial Valley all rely on the Colorado River, which also supplies urban Southern California via the Metropolitan Water District.

But California has also been relatively impervious to shortages on the river, with senior water rights long seen as bulletproof. Now, the questions hanging over the last days of negotiations are — how real is the threat of missing the deadline? And what exactly would the consequences be for California?

Blown deadlines on the Colorado River

For decades, federal officials have threatened to intervene if states in the Colorado River basin fail to reach agreement. The threat — and the inevitable lawsuits water suppliers fear would follow — have motivated major deals that now govern the river’s operations.

Actual federal intervention is far rarer — though the U.S. government has stepped in in the past, on a smaller scale.

In the early 2000s, Southern California was forced to stop using surplus Colorado River water when other states began clamoring for their fair share. The Interior Department set a deadline of December 31st, 2002 for California’s water agencies to cut a deal weaning themselves off the surplus water, or face immediate cutbacks.

The Imperial Irrigation District — by far the biggest user of Colorado River water in California — balked. So the Interior Secretary cut California’s supplies, leading to court battles and, ten months later, a deal.

But deadlines and threats seem to have lost their teeth in recent years, when states in the Colorado River basin have blown deadline after deadline, with little federal response.

Last week, Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs urged the Trump administration to be more assertive. “As we approach critical deadlines, we need the Trump administration to step in, exert leadership and broker a deal,” she said in remarks prepared for a water conference.

Elizabeth Koebele, a political science professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, said negotiations may have become too contentious for deadlines to matter. She attributed it to fracturing relationships between the basin states as devastatingly dry conditions on the river ratchet up the stakes.

“We have less water, and it’s caused more rippling problems,” Koebele said. “You're cutting a smaller pie, for more people.”

A strike against storage

The Veteran’s Day deadline isn’t the final deadline; it’s an interim milestone as federal officials race to lock in a plan before the current rulebook expires.

Scott Cameron, now acting head of the Bureau of Reclamation, said at a conference in June that in the absence of a deal, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum was prepared to take charge as water master. The position gives him the power to declare the river in shortage and call for cutbacks in the lower basin.

But the Trump administration declined to specify what exactly it might do. “At this stage, all parties should remain focused on the difficult but necessary work required to reach a seven-state agreement,” an unidentified Interior Department spokesperson said, in an emailed statement.

If there is still no plan by late 2026, the rulebook could revert to one from the 1970s, according to an analysis by Arizona State University’s Kyl Center for Water Policy.

That worries Metropolitan Water District’s Bill Hasencamp, because it would upend Metropolitan’s ability to continue banking water in the Colorado River basin’s Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the country, for dry spells.

The water giant imports water from Northern California and from the Colorado River to supply 19 million people in six Southern California counties.

Right now, Hasencamp, manager of Colorado River resources at Metropolitan, says that the district has socked away about 1.5 million acre-feet of water in the reservoir over the last 20 years. It’s enough to supply 4.5 million households for a year.

Metropolitan saves Colorado River water in Lake Mead when water from Northern California reservoirs is abundant, and draws on these stores when state supplies dry up. But, under the 1970s-era rules, suppliers would no longer be able to add water to this savings account. Metropolitan would need to use its banked stores over the next ten years, or risk losing the water.

Hasencamp estimates that banked water could disappear more quickly if California faces greater cuts.

“Under a new regime, the feds — if things get dry enough — could cut us back,” Hasencamp said. “We could access that storage, but we might need it to offset cuts on the river that could come to us. So it's a very undesirable situation.”

Ultimately, experts agree that the most undesirable situations, and the greatest risks to the basin states, will likely come from nature itself.

The Colorado River is in the grips of a megadrought; Brad Udall, a senior water and climate research scientist at Colorado State University’s Colorado Water Institute, called August’s projections for reservoirs Lake Powell and Mead “beyond awful.”

Udall said the latest projections for the reservoirs remain dire. One scenario shows “both Powell and Mead entering uncharted territory by (the) end of Water Year 2026,” Udall said in an email.

“That's the new reality,” Cameron, the acting head of Reclamation, said at a meeting in Arizona over the summer. “There are real risks to both the lower basin states and the upper basin states if we don't collectively do something differently than we've done in the past.”

This story was originally published by CalMatters, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that explains California policies and politics and makes its government more transparent and accountable.