Workers construct a post-assisted log structure or PALS, on the Brush Creek Valley Ranch and Open Space south of the town of Eagle. These structures mimic large woody debris like a downed cottonwood and are designed to promote and restore natural stream functioning in areas that have been degraded. Photo courtesy of Eagle County Open Space
By Heather Sackett
Colorado lawmakers may pass a stream-restoration bill this session, but it won’t be the one proponents and environmental groups were hoping for.
A bill aimed at making it easier for stream-restoration projects that mimic beaver activity to take place has been gutted after stakeholders couldn’t reach an agreement, underscoring how difficult it is for environmental interests to gain a toehold under Colorado’s system of water law.
An original draft of Senate Bill 270 clarified that restoration projects do not fall under the definitions of a diversion, storage or a dam; are presumed to not injure downstream water rights; and do not need to go through the lengthy and expensive water-court process to secure a water right or augmentation plan.
Project proponents would have had to file an information form with the Division of Water Resources (DWR) showing that projects would stay within the historical footprint of the floodplain before it was degraded and didn’t create new wetlands. Anyone, including downstream water users who believed the project would injure their water rights, could then challenge the project plans by filing a complaint.
The types of projects that the original bill aimed to address are known as low-tech, process-based restoration and include things such as beaver-dam analogs (BDAs). These temporary wood structures consist of posts driven into the streambed with willows and other soft materials woven across the channel between the posts.
By pooling water on small tributaries in the headwaters, these process-based restoration projects act as if rehydrating a dry sponge and restore watersheds to a more natural condition before they were degraded by human activities. These projects can improve water quality, raise the water table, and create a buffer against wildfires, drought and climate change. The idea is that by creating appealing habitat in areas that historically had beavers, the animals will recolonize and continue maintaining the health of the stream.
But the watered-down version of the bill that made it out of committee and is up for a second reading in the House on May 3 no longer addresses these types of projects. After amendments removed language referring to these projects, the bill now only includes minor stream-restoration activities such as bank stabilization or restructuring a channel to recover from wildfire or flood impacts.
“The stuff that got taken out was the projects that would reconnect the channel and the floodplains and push water out of the channel in a way that would saturate the meadow and potentially change the hydrology,” said Kelly Romero-Heaney, assistant director for water policy at the Colorado Department of Natural Resources (DNR). “Those projects are very much intended to maximize the ecological uplift from a stream restoration project. They are also the projects that gave the most heartburn to the water community.”
DNR staff and environmental groups were the proponents of the original legislation. If stream-restoration projects were required to secure a water right and spend money on an expensive augmentation plan, in which water is released to replace depletions that it causes, it could discourage these types of projects. Currently, proposals are evaluated by division engineers, who determine whether an augmentation plan is needed.
Two PALS on the Brush Creek Valley Ranch and Open Space south of the town of Eagle help restore natural stream functioning in areas that have been degraded by ranching and grazing. Eagle County Open Space installed 13 on a half-mile stretch of Brush Creek last fall. Photo courtesy of Eagle County Open Space
Agricultural concerns
Some agricultural water users were concerned that keeping water on the landscape for longer could potentially injure their downstream water rights by slowing the rate of runoff and creating more surface area for evaporation.
“Any time you’re talking about water and changing things in the water system, you run the risk of impacting water rights and the doctrine of prior appropriation, which is my guiding star when it comes to water issues,” state Sen. Cleave Simpson, a Republican, said at a Senate Agriculture and Natural Resources Committee hearing April 13. Simpson, a sponsor of the bill, is a rancher who represents District 6.
Prior appropriation is the cornerstone of Colorado water law in which the oldest water rights have first use of the river.
Austin Vincent, general counsel and director of public policy for the Colorado Farm Bureau, said the original bill would have placed an unfair and expensive burden on water rights holders to file a complaint and prove they were being injured by a stream-restoration project.
“It takes money to get an attorney and an engineer to prove your water right was injured,” he said. “The Farm Bureau is happy we are having this conversation, but we need to make sure this policy is done right. With the prior appropriation system being the law of the land here in Colorado, we need to make sure that’s not eroded.”
Pitkin County Commissioner Kelly McNicholas Kury testified at the committee hearing, expressing the county’s strong support for the original draft of the bill.
“Our western rivers are the lifeblood of our state and they are in crisis,” she said. “We should all be committed to restoring our rivers to a healthy and thriving state.”
Pitkin County has funded a summer program with the U.S. Forest Service for a beaver inventory in the headwaters of the Roaring Fork River, which could be the first step toward reintroducing the animals.
During negotiations on bill amendments, some groups had floated the idea of a cap that would place a limit on how much new surface area of water that restoration projects were allowed to create. But a too-small cap didn’t appeal to environmental groups.
“The cap became the dynamite stick in the water community dialogue,” said Abby Burk, western rivers region program manager for Audubon Rockies. “If we had gone forward with these caps, we would have caged stream restoration, so it was better to pause.”
Legislators have said they plan to revisit the issue in the interim committee and perhaps again next session with a new bill addressing process-based restoration projects.
This PALS on the Brush Creek Valley Ranch and Open Space south of the town of Eagle mimics a downed cottonwood. The Division 5 Engineer’s office said these post-assisted log structures don’t injure downstream water rights. Photo courtesy of Eagle County Open Space
Eagle County project
Staff from Eagle County Open Space learned firsthand the issues that can arise with stream-restoration projects, when they planned for 13 beaver-dam analogs to restore a half-mile section of Brush Creek that had seen intense ranching and grazing. The creek had been straightened and disconnected from its floodplain, and the riparian and aquatic habitat was impaired.
County staff submitted their plans to DWR, which told them they would have to get a plan for water replacement, or augmentation, to replace the water that would be evaporated from the small ponds created by the project.
“It appears the BDAs associated with this project will result in a series of impoundments in ponds/pools that will result in additional evaporation from increased surface area that will injure downstream water rights,” the response from DWR reads.
Getting an engineer to model the amount of water lost, then implementing a plan to replace that water was cost-prohibitive for the county, said Peter Suneson, open-space manager for Eagle County.
“Modeling a leaky beaver dam is doable, but you’re going to end up throwing a lot of money at it and you still have to find water to put back in the creek,” he said.
Instead of the BDAs, Eagle County instead moved forward with another low-tech, process-based project that DWR did not have a problem with: post-assisted log structures (PALS). These mimic large woody debris — a downed cottonwood tree, for example — that is affixed to a streambank and extends into the channel but does not span the entire waterway.
According to DWR, as long as PALS do not funnel water away from a diversion structure such as an irrigation headgate and do not impound water, they will not injure downstream users.
“We got 13 PALS in last fall and we are going to do that again this fall,” Suneson said.
It was exactly these types of projects that drafters of the original bill were hoping to make exempt from the water-court process, but which remain evaluated on a case-by-case basis by division engineers. But as drought and climate change have tightened their grip on Colorado, resulting in less water to go around, even restoration projects that everyone agrees are beneficial to the environment can be contentious.
“The entrenched interests like to see the status quo protected and preserved and those newer types of water uses, whether it be recreational or environmental, are at the end of the line,” said Drew Peternell, director of Trout Unlimited’s Colorado Water Program. “It’s a tough uphill battle to pass legislation that allows water to be used for those newer values.”
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ALBUQUERQUE, NEW MEXICO – NOVEMBER 2, 2022: A view of the Bosque and Rio Grande from Pat Baca Open Space in Albuquerque, NM on November 2, 2022. CREDIT: Adria Malcolm for New Mexico In Depth
Though the Rio Grande runs through the heart of New Mexico’s biggest city, you can easily miss it. Even from places where you’d expect to see water — designated parking areas near the river or paths along which you carry a boat to cast off from the nearest bank — it’s often invisible behind a screen of cottonwoods. Through much of the city, it hides behind businesses, warehouses, and strip malls.
From the riverbank or on the river itself, these curtains create a rare reprieve, a place in an urban area that can be mistaken for a pocket of wild. City noise infrequently penetrates the cottonwoods that beat back the heat and hum with insects and birdsong on summer days. The river often runs a murky, reddish beige that matches its muddy banks.
But invisibility also means the river’s more easily forgotten. That’s worrying for a river as water managers and stakeholders plan for the next five decades of water use in New Mexico — a period that will witness tough choices as a dire and historic drought continues and the river is unable to give everyone what they want or need.
Norm Gaume, a water resources engineer who once served as director of the New Mexico Interstate Stream Commission and as a water manager for the City of Albuquerque, has watched and participated in water planning in the state for decades. He agreed to take me down the river on the first warm spring day last year to talk about the future of the Rio Grande from the river itself. As soon as we launched downstream in his canoe, we began passing examples of ill-considered planning around the river: houses built in flood plains and scattered jetty jacks once planted on the riverbanks to channelize the historically sprawling riverbed and now primed to rip open a boat.
In the stretch where our trip finished, the river was so low that we had to wade, instead of float, back to our vehicles. It drove home Gaume’s core point: “All the desires for this poor little river exceed what it is.”
That situation is getting worse, and the consequences have us, as he said, “borrowing from the future to pay the river back today.”
New Mexico’s future will almost certainly be hotter and drier, with profound implications for our water and people who use it for homes, industries, farms, and recreation. Failing to plan holistically leaves the state running from one crisis to the next, whether that’s farmers weathering another dry season or biologists racing to save endangered fish in a vanishing waterway, and facing seemingly impossible choices, and improbable solutions, while time runs out.
New Mexico doesn’t have a good track record on planning when it comes to water. And now, as it nears the finish of drafting a 50-year water plan, some say they’ve continued to fall short: dedicating few staff and too little funds, not involving the right people and communities, and not imagining a future that encompasses the full spectrum of river uses, including the very existence of some species.
“This is not one of those issues that you can say, ‘Well, if we take a step in the right direction, in 20 years, we’ll have made headway,’” said Gina Della Russo, an ecologist who has worked along the Rio Grande for more than three decades. “We don’t have 20 years. We didn’t have 20 years 20 years ago.”
Climate change forces new approach to water planning
The Rio Grande has never been an easy river to live alongside. Through its 1,900-mile course, which begins in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains and ends in the Gulf of Mexico, running through broad valleys and tight gorges along the way, it’s known as dynamic and variable.
Historically, spring snowmelt flooded its banks. The river frequently changed course through its floodplain. Species that grew up alongside it, from the Rio Grande silvery minnow to cottonwood trees, adapted to that variety. Now, they depend on it. Silvery minnows spawn in spring runoff, and cottonwood’s white drifts of seeds sprout only after that rush of water leaves muddy ground.
But settlers saw the river’s erratic flows, side channels, backwaters, sweeping floodplains, and shifting banks as a hostile neighbor. As the communities of Albuquerque, Las Cruces, El Paso, and Ciudad Juarez, plus more than 200,000 acres of irrigated agriculture, arose alongside the river, humans harnessed it to produce more predictable flows. Levees and jetty jacks, asterisk-like stars of metal, set the river into a specific channel, while dams steadied its flow.
Now, a changing climate jeopardizes the river’s uses. Rising temperatures turn snow to rain. Spring runoff is starting earlier; already, it’s out of sync with when fish spawn and cottonwoods cast seeds. New Mexico’s history of swinging from wetter to drier periods about twice per century perpetuates faith that rain will return, but when, exactly, it is impossible to say. The state is 22 years into drought, and forecasts anticipate hotter and longer dry periods to come as climate change moves the Southwest into unprecedented ground where what we learned from the past may not apply well to the future.
“You can’t talk about water policy and investments without understanding the scale and scope of change that’s happening,” said U.S. Rep. Melanie Stansbury, who studied and worked in water policy and management for years before heading to Congress to represent New Mexico. “Sure, we can make micro-investments in different solutions that we tried in the 20th century and in the last few decades, but we really have to take a hard look at the science, figure out how we’re going to manage this system over the next century, given climate impacts, a completely different hydrologic regime, and a completely different need for ways in which we’re going to meet the existing and growing demands.”
“It’s just crucial that people understand this is not a one-time drought,” Stansbury said. “This is the change that climate change has brought to these systems and we have to act now, because literally the future of our communities depends on it.”
New Mexico has been barred from storing water upstream since June 2020 in large part because water held in a reservoir upstream that would have been sent to Texas was instead used to irrigate Middle Rio Grande farmers’ fields through a painfully dry summer, and it now owes significant water to Texas. That water obligation is set by the Rio Grande Compact, a multi-state agreement that determines how to divvy up the river.
Without that stored water to add to flows all summer, said Page Pegram, Rio Grande Basin water chief for New Mexico’s Interstate Stream Commission, the river will dry out, as it did in Albuquerque for the first time in 40 years last July. And that’s actually the natural state of the river, she said. “Flow has been relatively low, snowpack has been relatively low, but really what we saw this summer and early fall, before the rains really hit, was really the natural flow of the Rio Grande.”
The Rio Grande dried through the Albuquerque reach in 2022, for the first time in 40 years. Credit: Tara Armijo-Prewitt.
The prohibition on water storage upstream won’t be rescinded until the water stored in Elephant Butte and Caballo reservoirs comes above 400,000 acre feet. It’s currently around 150,000 acre feet.
“We can’t assume that we’re going to find more water anywhere, we have to assume that we’ve got to shrink the pie,” Pegram said. “From the state’s perspective, we just need to figure out how all different sectors can share in the shortage that we’re seeing in the middle Rio Grande, and that includes environmental, agriculture, municipalities—everybody.”
New Mexico is not alone.
“This whole region is grappling with water bankruptcy,” said Ali Mirchi, a professor at Oklahoma State University who co-authored a recent paper on the drying Middle Rio Grande.
Even cities that lean on groundwater aquifers to supply municipal taps aren’t safe from the drought-induced water crisis. Albuquerque relies on the Santa Fe Group Aquifer as well as the San Juan-Chama Drinking Water Project, which diverts water from the San Juan River to the Rio Grande to bolster supplies. That $400 million pipeline was built in 2008 to reduce reliance on an aquifer the city’s water utility admits is overtaxed. Research in the early 1990s showed a reservoir once thought to be virtually limitless was being pumped twice as fast as nature could replenish it.
Viewing rivers on the landscape’s surface and the aquifers, or groundwater, below it, as separate systems is a mistake, Mirchi said: “River water is our checking account. Groundwater is our savings account. So we’re depleting our savings.”
Worse still, when New Mexico drives up the amount of water it owes to Texas under the Rio Grande Compact, he added, that amounts to “maxing out the water credit cards.”
Striving to plan
In 2005, then-Gov. Bill Richardson recognized the most significant threat from climate change was to the state’s water sources. He tasked the Office of the State Engineer with drafting a report examining the changing snowpack, water availability and timing, increased water use by plants and people because of longer and hotter summers, and more frequent floods and droughts.
Anyone who has read Climate Change in New Mexico Over the Next 50 Years: Impacts on Water Resources, the scientific report published in March 2022 that will be foundational to the state’s forthcoming 50-year water plan, will hear an echo of that Richardson-era report. New Mexico faces the same challenges today. All that’s changed in 18 years is that more research has better characterized the consequences.
After Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham tasked the Interstate Stream Commission with preparing a 50-year water plan, the commission’s director, Rolf Schmidt Petersen, asked Nelia Dunbar, a volcanologist and director of the New Mexico Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources, to organize drafting a scientific report, called the “Leap Ahead Analysis Assessment,” to provide a foundation for creating the 50-year plan.
Dunbar assembled a team of authors, led by a climate scientist and a hydrologist, and the team spent hours in virtual meetings, brainstorming the reports’ components and discussing the ripple effects of forecast changes.
“We need to recognize that we are going to be dealing with a scarcer resource, and we wanted to provide some parameters about just how much scarcer that resource is going to be,” Dunbar said.
The 50-year plan is expected to soon be publicly released. But Mike Hamman, who leads the Office of the State Engineer, the state division tasked with drafting the plan, has said the effort faces “inertial issues.” He called out his agency’s limited capacity. Others have voiced concerns that the office is understaffed and underfunded, and facing so much turnover that too little expertise and too few staff remain to implement any new programs a plan might call for.
The Leap Ahead Analysis also excluded traditional ecological knowledge and expertise, said Julia Bernal, director of the Pueblo Action Alliance. The climate has changed over millennia, and Native communities have adapted to and survived those fluctuations.
“To not include them here is also doing a disservice to future climate mitigation plans,” she said. “This concept of ecosystems not including communities has also been very problematic because we tend to categorize human communities as separate from the natural environment and that’s just not the case.”
Alejandría Lyons, coordinator for New Mexico No False Solutions coalition, said the process for convening stakeholder groups to support drafting the water plan put everyone in different rooms, with the business community, nonprofits, indigenous communities, and farmers meeting separately. Lyons, who has a background working to increase access to the river among communities of color, worries that the approach cost New Mexicans a chance for open dialogue: “I think that it’s great that we were revisiting the 50-year water plan, but the way in which we’re doing it, we are, again, siloing our communities, and so the same people are receiving the same information, and it becomes this kind of echo chamber.”
In the end, she said, that may produce a plan ill-equipped to proactively address the crises on the horizon: “We’ll see the kind of water management like we have in the last 10 years,” she said, “where agencies are just picking up the pieces where they can.”
Lack of funding hobbles water planning
As he dipped a paddle into the water on our trip downriver, Gaume called the previous iteration of a state water plan a “shelf report”— a ream of paper printed with ideas and predictions about the state’s water future but with no actionable or enforceable elements. Lujan Grisham, who called for a state water plan in 2018, and the Office of the State Engineer requested $750,000 for this 50-year plan, but state lawmakers declined that request in 2020. The OSE pursued planning anyway, with just $350,000.
“The agency decided it was important enough that they would take it out of their hide, so to speak,” Gaume said.
The silt laden Rio Grande meanders through Albuquerque’s bosque. Credit: Marjorie Childress
This year, the Legislature appropriated $250,000 in recurring money for the 50-year water plan, plus a one-time $500,000 allocation for the plan.
But the limited funding for this round convinces Gaume that New Mexico remains a state that “doesn’t believe in water planning.” Of the new 50-year water plan, he said: “Really all it will be is a plan to plan.”
Short funding and little capacity—New Mexico’s Interstate Stream Commission has two staff working on water planning; Colorado, for comparison, has 13—mean the state’s plan can at best offer broad strokes, and leave working out the details to water planners working on more localized levels. Senate Bill 337, which passed on the second to last day of this legislative session, tries to map a path forward for that regional-level planning, as funding is available. The Office of the State Engineer estimated that it would need an additional full-time employee for the tasks the bill mapped out; the bill’s fiscal impact report points out that state agencies regulating and enforcing water policy in the state have faced staffing issues, and the additional responsibilities assigned in this bill do nothing to improve that problem.
A heron skims ahead, a red-tailed hawk barrels into the thickets, and a porcupine sits in a cottonwood, a dark knot where branches join. The khaki-colored water leaves indiscernible shapes and shadows below the surface, dark rocks and pale sandbars the canoe skids off or sinks into. Some paddle strokes catch more mud than water. We pass a few people along the banks: a woman with two blonde kids in pants so wet they sag, an older man in a blue polo who asks how far we’re going, five firefighters on fuels-reduction work, three young men with fishing poles.
As stakeholders vie for water where the demands already exceed what the river provides, the river so prone to running invisibly in the background has been left out entirely.
The Leap Ahead Analysis, when first released, did not include a chapter on rivers and managing ecological health. There are, however, chapters on agriculture and industry. Conservation groups brought this to the ISC staff’s attention in late 2021.
“If you don’t have a scientific foundation for those needs, then how do you expect to be able to form good policy?” said Tricia Snyder, who was then working with WildEarth Guardians, which has been watchdogging the Rio Grande for decades and filed repeated lawsuits for more ecologically sensitive management of the river. “If you are investigating the impacts on certain water uses and not others, then the state is already making decisions about which of those water uses will be prioritized in the future.”
There wasn’t time to add a chapter on rivers to the original Leap Ahead report, Dunbar said, but in December, the existing Leap Ahead report was replaced with one that includes a chapter on how river flows will change and how that will affect the physical condition of rivers.
“What we did not do, which I know the NGOs wanted us to do, was address endangered species, and recreation,” Dunbar said. “They wanted us to really look at rivers in a holistic way, and my point there was, that is not the point of this report.”
The point was to look at how the natural world was responding to climate change. But opening the scientific report to questions like those around endangered species or riparian vegetation restoration would require opening “the pandora’s box of water rights, and that was not something we wanted to do,” Dunbar said.
“I’ve poured countless hours of my life into this project and we had to have boundaries on this project,” Dunbar added. “I spent every weekend for many, many months. This was not part of my day job, it was something I did on top of my day job.”
The draft of the 50 year water plan has been with the governor’s office for months, awaiting review before public release.
Whatever the future brings, Della Russo said, it’s likely to come with tough decisions, and losses.
“But if those losses are balanced with longer-term resilience or stability in the system, then just help us understand how this is balanced,” she said. “We know pressures are just going to build on water in this system. So help us understand how the Rio Grande, as a living thing, has an opportunity to survive all these changes.”
The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.
Ultra deep snows in Silverton, Colorado. Credit: Flickr_creative commons
By Jerd Smith
Colorado is awash in white this spring, with statewide snowpack topping 140% of average this week, well above the reading a year ago, when it stood at just 97% of normal.
“Conditions in the American West are way better than they were last year at this time,” said state climatologist Russ Schumacher at a joint meeting Tuesday of the state’s Water Availability Task Force and the Governor’s Flood Task Force. “In Colorado we went from drought covering most of the state to most of the state being out of drought.”
Like other western states, mountain snowpacks in Colorado are closely monitored because as they melt in the spring and summer, their runoff delivers much of the state’s water.
A drought considered to be the worst in at least 1,200 years has devastated water supplies across the West. While no one is suggesting the dry spell is over, Colorado water officials said 2023 will likely allow for a significant recovery in reservoirs and soil moisture.
The snow is deepest in the southwestern part of the state, where the San Juan/Dolores river basin is seeing a snowpack of 179% of average.
The Yampa Basin, in the northwest corner of Colorado, is also nearing historic highs, with snowpack registering 145% of average, according to the Natural Resources Conservation Service Snow Survey.
There is considerably less white stuff east of the Continental Divide in the Arkansas River Basin, where snowpack remains slightly below average and in the South Platte Basin, where snowpack is just above average.
The outlook for the seven-state Colorado River Basin has improved dramatically as well, with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, in its March 15 report, showing that Lake Powell is likely to see some 10.44 million acre-feet of new water supply by the end of September, or inflows at 109% average.
The Colorado River Basin includes seven states, with Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming comprising the Upper Basin and Arizona, California and Nevada making up the lower basin. And it is in the mountains of the Upper Basin, especially in Colorado, where most of the water for the entire system is generated.
That Colorado is seeing such spectacular snow levels this spring, bodes well for everyone. “This is good news for the Colorado River Basin, no doubt about that,” Schumacher said.
Still the drought-strapped Colorado River system will see little storage recovery this year, according to Reclamation, which is forecasting that Lake Powell will see storage at just 32% of capacity by the end of the year. It had dropped to just 23% of capacity last year, prompting ongoing emergency releases from Utah’s Flaming Gorge Reservoir to help keep the system from crashing.
Within Colorado, statewide reservoir storage this month stands at 80% of average, up slightly from this time last year when it registered 75% of average.
Reservoirs within Colorado are expected to see a significant boost in storage levels. Colorado’s largest reservoir, Blue Mesa, was just 36% full earlier this month, but is projected to receive enough new water this year that it will be 71% full by the end of the year, according to Reclamation.
Flood task force officials said the deep snows, particularly in the southwestern and northwestern corners of the state, could cause flooding this spring and summer, especially if there is a series of hot, dry, windy days or major rain storms.
“We are blessed in large part because our snowpack tends to run off in a well-behaved manner,” said Kevin Houck, section chief of watershed and flood protection at the Colorado Water Conservation Board. “But I will say that I am watching things more closely this year. It’s not just the presence of snow that creates our problems. It needs to have a trigger as well. The classic trigger is the late spring warmup. And what can cause even more damage is when we get rain on snow as well.”
Jerd Smith is editor of Fresh Water News. She can be reached at 720-398-6474, via email at jerd@wateredco.org or @jerd_smith.
Fresh Water News is an independent, nonpartisan news initiative of Water Education Colorado. WEco is funded by multiple donors. Our editorial policy and donor list can be viewed at wateredco.org
The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.
A 23-year western drought has drastically shrunk the Colorado River, which provides water for drinking and irrigation for Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, California and two states in Mexico. Under a 1922 compact, these jurisdictions receive fixed allocations of water from the river – but now there’s not enough water to provide them.
As states try to negotiate ways to share the decreasing flow, the U.S. Department of the Interior is considering cuts of up to 25% in allotments for California, Nevada and Arizona. The federal government can regulate these states’ water shares because they come mainly from Lake Mead, the largest U.S. reservoir, which was created when the Hoover Dam was built on the Colorado River near Las Vegas.
These five articles from The Conversation’s archive explain what’s happening and what’s at stake in the Colorado River basin’s drought crisis.
The Colorado River provides water to 40 million people and some of the fastest-growing cities in the U.S., but its flow is dwindling.
1. A faulty river compact
The idea of negotiating a legally binding agreement to share river water among states was innovative in the 1920s. But the Colorado River Compact made some critical assumptions that have proved to be fatal flaws.
The lawyers who wrote the compact knew that the Colorado’s flow could vary and that they didn’t have enough data for long-term planning. But they still allocated fixed quantities of water to each participating state. “We know now that they used optimistic flow numbers measured during a particularly wet period,” wrote Patricia J. Rettig, head archivist of Colorado State University’s Water Resources Archive.
Nor did the compact encourage conservation as the West’s population grew. “When settlers developed the West, their prevailing attitude was that water reaching the sea was wasted, so people aimed to use it all,” Rettig observed.
2. Temporary cuts aren’t big enough
Western states have known for years that they were taking more water from the Colorado than nature was putting in. But reducing water use is politically charged, since it means imposing limits on such powerful constituencies as farmers and developers.
In 2019, officials from the U.S. government and the seven Colorado Basin states signed a seven-year drought contingency plan that temporarily reduced states’ water allocations. But the plan did not propose long-term strategies for addressing climate change or overuse of water in the region.
“Since 2000, Colorado River flows have been 16% below the 20th-century average,” wrote water policy experts Brad Udall, Douglas Kenney and John Fleck. “Temperatures across the Colorado River Basin are now over 2 degrees Fahrenheit (1.1 degrees Celsius) warmer than the 20th-century average, and are certain to continue rising. Scientists have begun using the term ‘aridification’ to describe the hotter, drier climate in the basin, rather than ‘drought,’ which implies a temporary condition.”
3. The looming threat of dead pool
Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the other major reservoir on the lower Colorado River, were created to provide water for irrigation and to generate hydropower, which is produced by the force of water flowing through large turbines in the lakes’ dams. If water in either lake drops below the intakes for the turbines, the lake will fall below “minimum power pool” and stop producing electricity.
If water in the lakes dropped even further, they could reach “dead pool,” the point at which water is too low to flow through the dam. This is an extreme scenario, but it can’t be ruled out, University of Arizona water expert Robert Glennon warned. In addition to drought and climate change, he noted, both lakes lie in canyons that “are V-shaped, like martini glasses – wide at the rim and narrow at the bottom. As levels in the lakes decline, each foot of elevation holds less water.”
This graphic shows the water level in Lake Powell as of November 2022 and the levels that represent minimum power pool and dead pool. Arizona Department of Water Resources
4. Why hydropower matters
Climate change and drought are stressing hydropower generation throughout the U.S. West by reducing snowpack and precipitation and drying up rivers. This could create serious stress for regional electric grid operators, according to Penn State civil engineers Caitlin Grady and Lauren Dennis.
“Because it can quickly be turned on and off, hydroelectric power can help control minute-to-minute supply and demand changes,” they wrote. “It can also help power grids quickly bounce back when blackouts occur. Hydropower makes up about 40% of U.S. electric grid facilities that can be started without an additional power supply during a blackout, in part because the fuel needed to generate power is simply the water held in the reservoir behind the turbine.”
While most hydropower dams are likely here to stay, in Grady’s and Dennis’ view, “climate change will change how these plants are used and managed.”
5. The resurrection of Glen Canyon
Lake Powell was created by flooding Glen Canyon, a spectacular swath of canyons on the Utah-Arizona border. As the lake’s water level drops, many side canyons have reemerged. Effectively, climate change is draining the lake.
A boat trip into zones of Glen Canyon that have been uncovered as water levels drop.
This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to recover a unique landscape, wrote University of Utah political scientist Dan McCool. “But managing this emergent landscape also presents serious political and environmental challenges.”
In McCool’s view, a key priority should be to give Native American tribes a meaningful role in managing those lands – including cultural sites and artifacts that were flooded when the river was dammed. The river has also deposited massive quantities of sediments in the canyon behind the dam, some of which are contaminated. And as visitors flock to newly accessible side canyons, the area will need staff to manage visitors and protect fragile resources.
“Other landscapes are likely to emerge across the West as climate change reshapes the region and numerous reservoirs decline. With proper planning, Glen Canyon can provide a lesson in how to manage them,” McCool observed.
The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.
To get a sense of the enormous amount of water atmospheric rivers dumped on the Western U.S. this year and the magnitude of the flood risk ahead, take a look at California’s Central Valley, where about a quarter of the nation’s food is grown.
This region was once home to the largest freshwater lake west of the Rockies. But the rivers that fed Tulare Lake were dammed and diverted long ago, leaving it nearly dry by 1920. Farmers have been growing food on the fertile lake bed for decades.
This year, however, Tulare Lake is remerging. Runoff and snowmelt from the Sierra Nevada have overwhelmed waterways and flooded farms and orchards. After similar storms in 1983, the lake covered more than 100 square miles, and scientists say this year’s precipitation is looking a lot like 1983. Communities there and across the West are preparing for flooding and mudslide disasters as record snow begins to melt.
Tulare Lake, long dry, begins to reemerge in March 2023 as flood water spreads across farm fields. NASA Earth Observatory
We asked Chad Hecht, a meteorologist with the Center for Western Weather and Water Extremes at the University of California San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, how 2023’s storms compare to past extremes and what to expect in the future.
How extreme were this year’s atmospheric rivers?
California averages about 44 atmospheric rivers a year, but typically, only about six of them are strong storms that contribute most of the annual precipitation total and cause the kind of flooding we’ve seen this year.
This year, in a three-week window from about Dec. 27, 2022, to Jan. 17, 2023, we saw nine atmospheric rivers make landfall, five of them categorized as strong or greater magnitude. That’s how active it’s been, and that was only the beginning.
In all, the state experienced 31 atmospheric rivers through the end of March: one extreme, six strong, 13 moderate and 11 weak. And other storms in between gave the Southern Sierra one of its wettest Marches on record.
These storms don’t just affect California. Their precipitation has pushed the snow-water equivalent levels well above average across much of the West, including in Oregon, Nevada, Utah, Idaho and the mountains of western Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico.
Snow water equivalent is a measure of the water in snowpack. Many basins across the West were well over 200% of average in 2023. NRCS/USDA
In terms of records, the big numbers this year were in California’s Southern Sierra Nevada. The region has had 11 moderate atmospheric rivers – double the average of 5.5 – and an additional four strong ones.
Overall, California has about double its normal snowpack, and some locations have experienced more than double the number of strong atmospheric rivers it typically sees. The result is that Northern Sierra snow water content is 197% of normal. The central region is 238% of normal, and the Southern Sierra is 296% of normal.
What risks does all that snow in the mountains create?
There is a lot of snow in the Sierra Nevada, and it is going to come off the mountains at some point. It’s possible we are going to be looking at snowmelt into late June or July in California, and that’s far into summer for here.
Flooding is certainly a possibility. The closest year for comparison in terms of the amount of snow would be 1983, when the average statewide snow water content was 60.3 inches in May. That was a rough year, with flooding and mudslides in several parts of the West and extensive crop damage.
This year, portions of the Southern Sierra Nevada have passed 1983’s levels, and Tulare Lake is filling up again for the first time in decades. Tulare Lake is an indication of just how extreme this year has been, and the risk is rising as the snow melts.
The transition from extreme drought in 2022 to record snow was fast. Is that normal?
California and some other parts of the West are known for weather whiplash. We frequently go from too dry to too wet.
2019 was another above-average year in terms of precipitation in California, but after that we saw three straight years of drought. We went from 13 strong or greater magnitude atmospheric rivers in 2017 to just three in 2020 and 2021, combined.
California relies on these storms for about half its water supply, but if the West gets too many atmospheric rivers back to back, that starts to have harmful impacts, like the heavy snowpack that collapsed roofs in the mountains this year, and flash flooding and landslides. These successive storms are typically referred to as atmospheric river families and can result in exacerbated hydrologic impacts by quickly saturating soils and not allowing rivers and streams to recede back to base flow between storms.
Are atmospheric rivers becoming more intense with a warming climate?
There’s been a lot of research on the impact of temperature because of how reliant California is on these storms for its water supply.
Atmospheric rivers are long, narrow corridors of water vapor in the sky that typically start in the tropics as water evaporates and is pulled poleward by atmospheric circulations. They carry a lot of moisture – on average, their water vapor transport is more than twice the flow of the Amazon River. When they reach land, mountains force the air to rise, which wrings out some of that moisture.
In a warming climate, the warmer air can hold more moisture. That can increase the capacity of atmospheric rivers, with more water vapor resulting in stronger storms.
Research by some of my colleagues at Scripps Institution of Oceanography also suggests that California will see fewer storms that aren’t atmospheric rivers. But the state will likely see more intense atmospheric rivers as temperatures rise. California will be even more reliant on these atmospheric rivers for its snow, which will result in drier dries and wetter wets.
So, we’re likely to see this whiplash continue, but to a more extreme level, with longer periods of dry weather when we’re not getting these storms. But when we do get these storms, they have the potential to be more extreme and then result in more flooding.
In the more immediate future, we’re likely headed into an El Niño this year, with warm tropical Pacific waters that shift weather patterns around the world. Typically, El Niño conditions are associated with more atmospheric river activity, especially in Central and Southern California.
So, we may see another wet year like this again in 2024.
The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.
Rancher Bryan Bernal irrigates a field that depends on Colorado River water near Loma, Colo. Credit: William Woody
By Jerd Smith
To help restore the dwindling Colorado River, farmers and ranchers in Colorado have submitted 36 proposals which, if approved, will authorize them to temporarily stop irrigating their land this year in return for federal cash payments, allowing more water to stay in the river.
The effort is known as the System Conservation Pilot Program (SCPP) and is part of a broader initiative by Colorado and three other states to help stabilize the river system.
The Colorado River Basin includes seven states. Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming comprise the Upper Basin, while Arizona, California and Nevada make up the Lower Basin. Efforts to cut agricultural water use are underway in the Lower Basin as well.
The Upper Colorado River Commission (UCRC), which is responsible for approving and implementing the pilot program, received 88 applications from growers in the four Upper Basin states, including the 36 from Colorado. How much water savings the pilot might generate across the four states is unclear. The UCRC did not respond to a request for comment. It is expected to make decisions on which applications will move forward next month. A special public meeting to address the SCPP is scheduled in Salt Lake City April 10.
If all of Colorado’s applications are approved, 5,480 acres of land on Western Slope farms and ranches would be involved, resulting in more than 8,334 acre-feet of what’s known as conserved consumptive use water being saved for the river, according to an initial analysis of the applications by the Colorado Water Conservation Board (CWCB). Typically, when water is applied to fields, a portion of that liquid returns to the stream and isn’t used by the crop itself. The portion that is used by the crop is considered consumptive use. In most water rights transactions, it is only this consumptive use water that can be transferred or sold to another user. The applications included options to save water ranging from switching to less thirsty crops to partial-season irrigation to full-season fallowing.
Map showing general locations of proposed SCPP projects in Colorado. Source: Colorado Water Conservation BoardSummary of SCPP project proposals in Colorado by basin. Source: Colorado Water Conservation Board
In January, the federal government and the UCRC, which represents Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming, signed an agreement providing $125 million in federal funding over a three-year period to pay for the initiative.
Last week, the CWCB, the state’s lead agency for water planning, designated the SCPP as an official conservation program under state law, meaning that growers who participate would not be penalized or see their water rights harmed.
The applications were made by agricultural producers in the Yampa, White, Colorado, Gunnison and San Juan/Dolores river basins, according to the CWCB. Each basin is a major tributary to the seven-state Colorado River system.
Reducing farm and ranch water is considered critical to helping stabilize the river because agriculture consumes about 80% of the river’s supplies.
Each year millions of acre-feet of Colorado River water are used to grow crops across the basin. How much the pilot program might help reduce that amount has yet to be determined. The 8,334-plus acre-feet of water savings represented in the Colorado applications is remarkably little, and could indicate that growers are skeptical about the program, officials said.
“That the pilot program has attracted few applications is an indicator that the prices the UCRC is offering, $150 an acre-foot, are too low,” said Jennifer Gimbel, a former principal deputy assistant secretary of water and science at the U.S. Department of the Interior who also served as a director of the Colorado Water Conservation Board.
Another issue, Gimbel said, is that the SCPP water will be left in the Colorado River to benefit the whole system, rather than being transported to Lake Powell, where it could be held for the benefit of the Upper Basin states.
“There is no protection for this [SCPP] water,” Gimbel said. “It could go directly to the Lower Basin states. There might be [Upper Basin] farmers out there saying ‘why bother?’”
Last summer, U.S. Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Camille Touton ordered the Colorado River Basin states to come up with a consensus plan to cut water use by 2 million to 4 million acre-feet.
This Upper Basin pilot program is one effort to help do that, at least in the short term.
In Colorado, however, critics say the process has moved too fast to allow proper in-state review. And they say that the CWCB’s and the UCRC’s failure to make applications public, so that they can be reviewed by taxpayers and water districts who oversee those irrigation systems, raises questions about the program’s transparency.
Steve Wolff manages the Durango-based Southwestern Water Conservation District, one of the districts which sought to review applications within its boundaries. Wolff said his district wants a chance to determine if other water users would be harmed by the federally funded fallowing program.
He said that CWCB Director Becky Mitchell, who also serves as the Colorado Commissioner on the UCRC, failed to honor a commitment made last year to allow the Southwestern district, along with the Glenwood Springs-based Colorado River District, to review the applications and approve them based on their criteria, not just the criteria of the Upper Colorado River Commission.
“It needed to be an open and transparent process,” Wolff said. “Everybody should be allowed to see these. It’s public money and that should allow a public review process.”
Colorado River District General Manager Andy Mueller did not respond to a request for comment. But in a river district board meeting March 16, Mueller also said he was disappointed at the change in the review process.
“That was disturbing to us,” Mueller said, “because it is a reversal from a commitment made by the commissioner last December.”
Chris Arend, public information officer for the Colorado Department of Natural Resources and a spokesperson for Mitchell, declined to comment on that point, but said in an e-mailed statement that Mitchell and the CWCB would give the districts the same opportunity to comment on the applications as the CWCB was being given.
And Mitchell said at last week’s CWCB meeting that she would work to have applications that have been redacted to protect private information released to the public eventually.
Gimbel said this SCPP will help show that agricultural water users can conserve water.
But she said the Upper Basin should move forward with what is known as a demand management program, something the states are working on that would free up water to fill a special 500,000 acre-foot drought pool in Lake Powell, where the water would be saved for the benefit of the Upper Basin states.
“To me this [SCPP] is a great first step,” Gimbel said. “But it is going to cost more and require more political will” to craft a long-term agricultural water conservation program that will help stabilize the Colorado River and keep water in Lake Powell for the benefit of the Upper Basin states.
Jerd Smith is editor of Fresh Water News. She can be reached at 720-398-6474, via email at jerd@wateredco.org or @jerd_smith.
Fresh Water News is an independent, nonpartisan news initiative of Water Education Colorado. WEco is funded by multiple donors. Our editorial policy and donor list can be viewed at wateredco.org.
The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.
It’s expensive to pollute the water in Colorado. The state’s median fine for companies caught violating the federal Clean Water Act is over US$30,000, and violators can be charged much more. In Montana, however, most violators get barely a slap on the wrist – the median fine there is $300.
Similarly, in Virginia, the typical Clean Water Act violation issued by the state is $9,000, while across the border in North Carolina, the median is around $600.
Even federal penalties vary significantly among regions. In the South (EPA Region 6) the median Clean Water Act penalty issued by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regional office is $10,000, while in EPA Region 9 (including California, Nevada, Arizona and Hawaii), the median is over six times as high.
We discovered just how startling the differences are in a new study, published in the Stanford Environmental Law Journal. My colleague Amy Vaughan and I reviewed 10 years of EPA data on penalties issued under the Clean Water Act.
There is a relatively simple solution, and another good reason to implement it: These disparities may violate the U.S. Constitution.
Why such big differences?
We think the main reason for the differences is that the EPA has not fulfilled its duty to require robust state enforcement.
Many federal environmental statutes – including the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act and toxic substances laws – enable the EPA to delegate enforcement to state agencies. In fact, state agencies undertake the vast majority of enforcement actions of these federal laws.
However, the EPA is supposed to delegate enforcement only to states that are deemed capable of taking on this responsibility, including having the ability to issue permits and conduct inspections. Importantly, the states must have laws authorizing an agency or the courts to impose sufficient penalties on violators.
Federal laws like the Clean Water Act helped end corporate practices of pouring toxic wastewater into rivers, as this paper plant was doing near International Falls, Minn., in 1937. Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images
Most state delegations occurred long ago, in the 1970s and ‘80s, shortly after Congress passed these major environmental statutes. In 1978, EPA decided that it would require states to have a minimum of $5,000-per-day penalty authority before they would be delegated enforcement power for the Clean Water Act. Forty-five years later, that required minimum is still the same.
In contrast, the Clean Water Act gives the EPA and federal courts much higher penalty authority – it started at $25,000 per day and, because of congressionally mandated annual inflation adjustments, had risen to $56,540 by the end of 2022.
That difference shows up in the fines: We found the average penalty issued by states is about $35,000, while the average penalty issued by the federal EPA is over five times as high at $186,000. The median state penalty is $4,000, while the median federal penalty is almost $30,000. While the EPA tends to be involved in the most serious cases, we believe low state penalties can also be traced to more lenient state penalty provisions.
In some cases, penalty differences might have a legitimate explanation. However, the degree of disparity among statutes and penalties that we found with the Clean Water Act suggests the U.S. doesn’t have uniform federal environmental law. And that can run afoul of the Constitution.
A question of unconstitutional unfairness
The EPA has the power to require states to have more robust penalty provisions, more in line with federal penalties. The EPA also can provide better guidance to the states about how those penalties should be calculated. Without guidance, virtually any penalty could be justified.
As an environmental law expert, I believe the U.S. Constitution requires EPA to take these steps.
A basic tenet of fairness holds that like cases should be treated alike. In federal criminal law, for example, sentencing guidelines help limit the disparity that can result from unlimited judicial discretion.
Unfortunately, environmental law doesn’t have a similar system to provide uniform treatment of pollution violations by government agencies. Extreme penalties, at both the high and low ends, may result.
The U.S. Supreme Court has held that disparate fines can reach a degree of randomness that violates the fairness norms embodied in the due process clause of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment.
In a case in the 1990s, the Supreme Court determined that a $4 million punitive damage award in a complaint involving only $4,000 in actual damages violated the due process clause. The court held that the amount of punitive damages imposed must bear some relationship to the actual harm caused by the conduct. Moreover, the court noted that punitive damages must be reasonable when compared to penalties imposed on others for comparable misconduct.
I believe the same test should apply to environmental penalties.
Unless we have some uniform system of calculating penalty amounts, the discretion allowed results in vastly different penalties for similar conduct. Our study focused on the Clean Water Act, but the results should trigger more research to determine whether these issues arise in other environmental areas, such as the Clean Air Act or hazardous waste laws.
The comparatively lenient enforcement we discovered in some states is not only unfair, it’s ultimately bad for the environment.
The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.
After three years of extreme drought, the Western U.S. is finally getting a break. Mountain ranges are covered in deep snow, and water reservoirs in many areas are filling up following a series of atmospheric rivers that brought record rain and snowfall to large parts of the region.
Many people are looking at the snow and water levels and asking: Is the drought finally over?
There is a lot of nuance to the answer. Where you are in the West and how you define “drought” make a difference. As a drought and water researcher at the Desert Research Institute’s Western Regional Climate Center, here’s what I’m seeing.
How fast each region recovers will vary
The winter of 2023 has made a big dent in improving the drought and potentially eliminating the water shortage problems of the last few summers.
I say “potentially” because in many areas, a lot of the impacts of drought tend to show up in summer, once the winter rain and snow stop and the West starts relying on reservoirs and streams for water. Spring heat waves like the ones we saw in 2021 or rain in the mountains could melt the snowpack faster than normal.
Atmospheric rivers in January brought heavy rain across large parts of the West. Another powerful storm system hit in March. Climate.gov
It seems as though most of the surface water drought – drought involving streams and reservoirs – could be eliminated by summer in California and the Great Basin, across Nevada and western Utah.
The early 2023 storms likely could have filled Lake Oroville, one of California’s largest reservoirs. But reservoirs are also essential for flood management, so managers balance how much water to retain and how much to release. NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin
But that’s only surface water. Drought also affects groundwater, and those effects will take longer to alleviate.
Studies in California have shown that, even after wet years like 2017 and 2019, the groundwater systems did not fully recover from the previous drought, in part because of years of overpumping groundwater for agriculture, and the aquifers were not fully recharging.
In that sense, the drought is not over. But at the broader scale for the region, a lot of the drought impacts that people experience will be lessened or almost gone by this summer.
The Colorado River Basin
Similar to the Sierra Nevada, the Upper Colorado River Basin – Wyoming, Colorado, Utah and northwestern New Mexico – has a healthy snowpack this year, and it’s looking like a very good water year there.
The snow water equivalent, a measure of snowpack, was over 200% of average in several areas on March 21, 2023. Drought.gov
Two good water years won’t do it either. Over the next decade, most years will have to be above average to begin to fill those giant reservoirs. Rising temperatures and drying will make that even harder.
So, that system is still going to be dealing with a lot of the same long-term drought impacts that it has been seeing. The reservoirs will likely rise some, but nowhere close to capacity.
The Pacific Northwest
The Pacific Northwest isn’t having as much rain and snow, and it’s a little drier there. But it’s close to average, so there’s not a huge concern there, at least not right now.
Forests, range land and the fire risk
Drought can also have longer-term impacts on ecosystems, particularly forest health.
The Sierra Nevada range has seen large-scale tree die-offs with the drought in recent years, including in northern areas around Lake Tahoe and Reno that weren’t as affected by the previous drought. Whether the recent die-offs there are due to the severity of the current drought or lingering effects from the past droughts is an open question.
Even with a wet winter, it’s not clear how soon the forests will recover.
Rangelands, since they are mostly grasses, can recover in a few months. The soil moisture is really high in a lot of these areas, so range conditions should be good across the West – at least going into summer.
Drought and bark beetles have killed millions of trees across California in recent years, contributing to wildfire risk. David McNew/Getty Images
If the West has another really hot, dry summer, however, the drought could ramp up again, particularly in the Northwest and California. And then communities will have to think about fire risk.
In the higher-elevation mountains and forests, the above-average snowpack is likely to last longer than it has in recent years, so those regions will likely have a later start to the fire season. But lower elevations, like the Great Basin’s shrub- and grassland-dominated ecosystem, could see fire danger starting earlier in the year if the land dries out.
Long-term outlooks aren’t necessarily reliable
By a lot of atmospheric measures, California appears to be coming out of drought, and the drought feels like it’s ending elsewhere. But it’s hard to say when exactly the drought is over. Studies suggest the West’s hydroclimate is becoming more variable in its swings from drought to deluge.
Drought is also hard to forecast, particularly long term. Researchers can get a pretty good sense of conditions one month out, but the chaotic nature of the atmosphere and weather make longer-range outlooks less reliable.
We saw that this year. The initial forecast was for a dry winter 2023 in much of the West. But in California, Arizona and New Mexico, the opposite happened.
Seasonal forecasts tend to rely heavily on whether it’s an El Niño or La Niña year, involving sea surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific that can affect the jet stream and atmospheric conditions around the world. During La Niña – the pattern we saw from 2020 until March 2023 – the Southwest tends to be drier and the Pacific Northwest wetter.
NOAA explains El Niño and La Niña.
But that pattern doesn’t always set up in exactly the same way and in the same place, as we saw this year.
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The main boat ramp at Wahweap Marina was unusable due to low water levels in Lake Powell in December 2021. The Upper Colorado River Commission has released few details of proposals for a system conservation program designed to boost water levels in Lake Powell and Lake Mead.
Upper Colorado River Basin water managers have released little information so far about the Colorado proposals submitted for a conservation program, raising concerns about the approval process of the program, which aims to dole out $125 million in federal taxpayer money.
The Colorado Water Conservation Board on March 22 posted on its website the heavily redacted applications for 22 projects that meet the preliminary criteria for approval in a rebooted System Conservation Program (SCP). But in addition to redacting the applicants’ personal identifying information, nearly everything else has been blacked out as well: the location of the projects, such as which streams and ditches are involved; details of the water rights involved; and how much the applicants are asking to be paid for their water. (Here is an example of one of the applications.)
The Colorado River Water Conservation District wrote a memo and discussed the issue at a board meeting Thursday. The state and the Upper Colorado River Commission, which is administering the program, had invited the River District and the public to provide input on the project proposals. But with so little information available, the River District said that is impossible.
“Most, if not all, substantive details are blacked out,” the memo reads. “Thus, it is not possible to provide meaningful analysis of the applications, including whether implementation of the individual proposals would cause injury to other West Slope water users.”
River District General Manager Andy Mueller said his organization, which advocates for water users across 15 Western Slope counties, has concerns about the lack of a public process.
“At this point, that program is not something the district is going to have the capacity to weigh in on in any substantive manner,” he said. “We are proceeding to prepare comments from the district to the UCRC in terms of our concerns about how this process happened… It’s not the way we wish it had been to say the least.”
Becky Mitchell, CWCB executive director and state commissioner to the UCRC, had promised that the River District and Southwestern Water Conservation District would have a say in the approval of project proposals within their boundaries. The River District then developed criteria to evaluate projects, which included who could benefit from program money and preventing too much participation in a single basin. But on March 10, Mitchell walked back her commitment, saying only the UCRC could approve projects, using its own criteria.
The SCP was restarted this year as part of the UCRC’s 5-Point Plan, which is aimed at protecting critical elevations in the nation’s two largest and depleted reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead. The program will be paid for with $125 million in federal funding from the Inflation Reduction Act and will pay water users in the upper basin states — Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming — to cut back. The original SCP, which ran from 2015 to 2018, saved an estimated 47,000 acre-feet of water, at a cost of about $8.6 million. For the renewed program, the UCRC set a baseline price of $150 per acre-foot of water saved, but applicants can ask for more.
Paying water users to irrigate less has long been controversial on the Western Slope, with fears that these temporary and voluntary programs could lead to a permanent “buy and dry” situation that would negatively impact rural farming and ranching communities.
This ditch in the Yampa River basin is used to irrigate fields. A handful of West Slope agricultural water users have submitted proposals to be paid to use less water as part of a rebooted system conservation program.
Officials say more information to come
CWCB and UCRC officials say more details of the projects will be made available after they are approved and contracts are in place. The UCRC is set to consider the proposals at an April 10 meeting.
The decision to redact nearly all the information in the applications was a result of a conversation among the UCRC commissioners, said UCRC Executive Director Chuck Cullom.
“There was a discussion, and that’s what the four state commissioners were comfortable sharing at this time,” Cullom said.
According to Amy Ostdiek, CWCB section chief for Interstate, Federal and Water Information, the final implementation agreements and verification plans might look different — after analysis, revisions and back-and-forth with UCRC consultant Wilson Water Group and the applicant — from what was initially proposed. That is part of the reason the information in the proposals is not yet public, she said.
“We, frankly, didn’t want to make a bunch of personal information about our water users or their property, their water rights or how they value them public until we knew we were moving forward with the project,” Ostdiek said. “If they are providing a lot of information that doesn’t get incorporated,… we didn’t want to release that personal information when it wouldn’t be part of a project anyway.”
Ostdiek said the UCRC received more than 80 proposals for projects across the upper basin states. Thirty-six of those were in Colorado, and 22 so far have been given preliminary approval. Those 22 projects (one of which involves land in Wyoming) are estimated to involve 5,800 acres of land and save up to 9,618 acre-feet of water. Most propose halting irrigation for at least part of, if not the entire, season. Ostdiek said the state and division engineers at the Department of Water Resources are reviewing the proposals to make sure projects don’t cause injury to other water users.
Ostdiek said the approval process by the UCRC would be different from that of CWCB, which was narrow and simply designated SCP as a “state-approved conservation program” so that participants could be protected from Colorado’s “use it or lose it” law.
“(The UCRC) will be looking at individual projects,” she said. “It will be a different process than what our board did.”
Both Ostdiek and Cullom said more information will be publicly available after the approval process, but exactly what information that will be is unclear.
“We need to coordinate with the other three upper division states,” Ostdiek said. “We are still kind of working through these issues, but I think it’s fair to say more information will be available once these projects are contracted.”
Aspen Journalism covers water and rivers in collaboration with The Aspen Times.
The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.
A section of a Colorado Springs Utilities Water-Wise Neighborhood demonstration garden displays plants that require very little water. Credit: Jane Palmer
Nevada lawmakers are considering a bold step to ensure that Las Vegas’s basic water needs will continue to be met in the near future. The Southern Nevada Water Authority (SNWA), which manages the city’s water, is seeking authority, through a sweeping omnibus bill, to cap a single family’s residential water use in southern Nevada to about 160,000 gallons (600,000 liters) annually.
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“If approved, this provision would really only affect our community’s largest water users,” said SNWA spokesperson Bronson Mack—“that top 20% of residential water users who use more than 35% of all water delivered to the residential sector.”
This latest development is just one of the ways the authority has sought to protect its community’s access to water. And it’s been so successful in its mission that in the past 20 years, southern Nevada has reduced water consumption from Lake Mead by about 30%, even as the area’s population increased by more than 750,000. When the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation declared a shortage of water in the Colorado River in 2021, the region and the city handled the 25,000-acre-foot (1.2-million-liter) reduction of their water supply in 2022 with relative ease.
Despite the megadrought in the U.S. West and the fact that the Colorado River’s flow is shrinking fast, it’s been a similar story in other cities in the Colorado River Basin. Colorado Springs, Colo., a city of more than half a million, uses the same amount of water it did in the 1980s, even though its population has nearly doubled. In 2020, per capita residential water use in Tucson, Ariz., was down by about 32% from its average in 1996.
“This is a desert, and we should live like we are in a desert by being efficient with the limited water supply we have.”
The water conservation success in these basin cities has been attributed to a mix of incentives, regulations, tiered water pricing, and education. Raising awareness about water scarcity and the natural environment has proved key—especially in Las Vegas, which receives only about 4 inches (110 millimeters) of rainfall per year, said Zane Marshall, director of SNWA’s water resources department. “This is a desert, and we should live like we are in a desert by being efficient with the limited water supply we have,” he said.
Consequently, in Colorado Springs, the second-largest city in the state, there’s been a focus on encouraging householders and businesses to convert nearly 1.8 million square feet (168,000 square meters) of turfgrass to the natural vegetation of the landscape. Although Colorado Springs Utilities’ primary goal is to conserve water, it also strives to create an urban environment that people can enjoy.
“We want to make sure that the landscapes are healthy and attractive while providing all the ecosystem services that urban landscapes need to provide,” said Julia Gallucci, a Colorado Springs Utilities water conservation supervisor.
To that end, the utility has two Water-Wise Neighborhood demonstration gardens where they test many plant species, including 11 grasses, to determine water use and climate adaptability. Visitors can stroll through the gardens or view photos online and learn how to practice water-conscious landscaping.
The Water-Wise demonstration gardens in Colorado Springs display a range of natural plants, shrubs, and grasses that require little irrigation. Credit: Colorado Springs Utilities
In southern Nevada, the water authority has capitalized on its proximity to Lake Mead and Colorado River water. Virtually every drop of the community’s indoor water use is treated and then returned to Lake Mead. Every gallon returned acts as a credit against the region’s water allocation for the year. “It’s a unique situation in that the community’s indoor water use doesn’t negatively impact the available water supply,” Marshall said.
In Tucson, the city is using rainfall to bolster its water supply. Although, like Las Vegas, Tucson is a desert city, it receives more rainfall, mostly in the monsoon season. In 2012, Tucson Water started a program to rebate homeowners up to $2,000 for the purchase of rainwater-collecting equipment or the adoption of landscape design systems that could capture rainfall.
“It’s a way to augment the supply, while naturally the city is focusing on using less water,” said Susanna Eden, research and outreach programs officer of the University of Arizona’s Water Resources Research Center.
The idea is to integrate the harvested water with cultivating desert-adapted plants. In 2013, the city implemented a Green Streets policy, requiring that new and reconstructed roadways be designed to harvest the 10.6 inches (270 millimeters) of rainfall the city gets per year to sustain such plants near the road. “That meant that the city itself was practicing what it was advocating for other people,” Eden said.
Lessons for Future Savings
Cities account for only a fraction of the total water drawn throughout the Colorado River Basin. Eighty percent of the water in the basin feeds agriculture, and thermoelectric power and mining also withdraw some of the river’s water. Some of the lessons gleaned from urban water conservation efforts could inform other water users in the basin. For example, getting everyone to the table in water discussions and educating parties on both the crisis and possible ways forward have proved essential in the success of conserving water in southern Nevada, Marshall said.
“Efficiency is the most cost-effective source of water for us, and it will ensure that we don’t need to develop more water supplies.”
Gallucci concurred. Colorado Springs Utilities’ goal is to cultivate urban landscapes that need watering, on average, only 1 day a week. Hitting that target in the next 20 years will require education for the entire community, she said. “The switch to native vegetation is really beautiful, and it could mean less maintenance over time, but you have to have the right formula,” she said. “We don’t want people to fail because they were trying to do the right thing.”
Measuring how water is used and identifying any inefficiencies are also important in continuing to improve water conservation, whether in cities or on farmland, Gallucci said. In cities, these types of measurements need to take place from the distribution system all the way through to the customers so that every loose end, every inefficiency, can be tightened up. “Efficiency is the most cost-effective source of water for us, and it will ensure that we don’t need to develop more water supplies,” Gallucci said.
Rebates, incentives, and retrofits all cost money, but in the Colorado River Basin, it’s a case of pay now or pay later, Marshall said. So it is best to invest in water savings strategies as soon as possible. “The cost of bringing in water from elsewhere is way more expensive than conservation,” he said. “Conservation is our least expensive form of water.”
The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Water Desk launched in April 2019 with support from the Walton Family Foundation. We maintain a strict editorial firewall between our funders and our journalism.
