It’s crunch time for negotiators from seven western states trying to strike a deal before Feb. 14 on how to share the dwindling Colorado River.
But four days of talks in a Salt Lake City conference room earlier this month did not appear to have sparked a breakthrough.
“We got tired of each other,” Utah’s negotiator, Gene Shawcroft, said Tuesday at a public board meeting, days after the meeting ended. “And two of the days, we made some progress, but one day we went backwards almost as much progress as we made in two and a half days.”
The states in the lower and upper basins remain at an impasse over how cuts to water use should be handled during times of drought.
In another sign that talks remain stalled, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum reportedly invited governors from the seven states in the river basin to attend a meeting in Washington on Jan. 30.
A spokesperson for Colorado Gov. Jared Polis confirmed the meeting invitation to KUNC and said in a statement that Polis “hopes to attend this meeting if it works for the other Governors.”
Meanwhile, the Interior Department recently released a playbook of options for how to manage the river in the future.
John Berggren, a water policy expert at Western Resource Advocates, said many of the scenarios on the table can only be taken if all the states in the basin agree to them.
“The fact that the states don't have a seven state agreement right now means that we can't consider some of these really good, new, innovative tools that are in some of the alternatives,” he said Tuesday. And so that's pretty frustrating."
What could management of the vital waterway look like after the current rules expire in August?
Berggren, who got his Ph.D. at the University of Colorado focusing on sustainable water management in the Colorado River Basin, helped KUNC’s water desk summarize the five options on the table from the feds.
He said an eventual deal might incorporate pieces from several of the alternatives.
Basic coordination
This is the only path the feds say they currently have the legal power to take if the seven states fail to reach an agreement.
Berggren said this option would likely ‘normalize’ 1.48 million acre feet of water shortages each year in the lower basin states.
“And this would just basically say every year, that’s a given,” Berggren said.
A single acre foot is 326,000 gallons of water.
Upper basin states, including Colorado, would not be forced to contribute more water in dry years.
Berggren said this option “does not do enough.”
“There’s many years where the system crashes,” he said.
A crash means Lake Powell and Lake Mead reach deadpool, a scenario where they’re so critically low that hydroelectricity stops and water stops flowing through their dams.
Millions of water users in the west could see impacts.
Enhanced coordination
Berggren calls this plan ‘a little more innovative.’
Highlights include the power to use conservation pools that encourage and incentivize states and water users to find ways to save water.
That could mean the feds paying states to conserve water. Lower basin states could also put water they save in Lake Mead to stay there until they need it.
“It’s water security, because if we can save water today, we’ll put it into storage and we can withdraw it later when we need it,” Berggren said.
This option also includes contributions from the upper basin states each year that would gradually increase over time.
The Interior Department writes this option “seeks to protect critical infrastructure while benefitting key resources (such as environmental, hydropower, and recreation) through an approach to distributing storage between Lake Powell and Lake Mead that enhances the reservoirs’ abilities to support the Basin.”
No action
This plan might sound like the path with the least impact, but that’s far from the case.
This path would revert the operating procedures at Powell and Mead to what they were almost 20 years ago.
“It basically says Reclamation will shoot to release 8.23 million acre feet of water from Powell, and that’s kind of it,” Berggren said. “Not a lot of authority for lower basin shortages, not a lot of authority to modify your reservoir operations to try and prevent the worst from happening. No action very clearly crashes the system quickly, and no one wants it.”
According to the Interior Department, “there would be no new mechanisms to proactively conserve and store water in Lake Powell or Lake Mead.”
This option was legally required to be included in the feds report on operating scenarios.
Maximum flexibility
This proposal was developed by a group of seven conservation groups.
Interior said this alternative is “designed to help stabilize system storage, incentive proactive water conservation, and extend the benefits of conservation and operational flexibility to a wide range of resources.”
It’s also designed to give dam operators more flexibility to respond to the impacts of climate change.
Berggren said this option allows water users to conserve water and store it in reservoirs.
It would also change the way water releases are handled.
A “climate response indicator” would be introduced to help decide how much water should be released from Lake Powell.
“If the last three years have been really dry or exceptionally dry, then you adjust your Lake Powell releases,” he said.
Berggren and his environmental group, Western Resource Advocates, had a hand in developing this alternative along with the six other organizations.
All seven of the organizations that crafted the river management proposal have received funding from the Walton Family Foundation, which also supports KUNC’s Colorado River coverage.
Supply driven alternative
“All this does is say that what you release from Lake Powell down to Lake Mead is based on some percentage of the preceding three years,” Berggren said. “You look at the past three years, and you take some percentage of that, and that's what you release from Glen Canyon Dam, and that's basically it.”
He said the plan, which incorporates ideas from the states themselves, was nicknamed “the amicable divorce of the basins.”
“Because it was basically the upper basin will do its thing with Lake Powell and its upper basin reservoirs,” he said. “And then whatever gets released, lower basin deals with that, deals with Lake Mead, deals with lower basin shortages.”
Shortages in the lower basin could be up to 2.1 million acre feet a year in this scenario, according to the Interior Department.
Public comment is being accepted on all five alternatives through early March.
This story is part of ongoing coverage of the Colorado River, produced by KUNC in Colorado and supported by the Walton Family Foundation. KUNC is solely responsible for its editorial coverage.
