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Colorado River cuts won’t make Phoenix taps go dry, but the backup plan will cost billions

By
Alex Hager, KJZZ
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Colorado River water flows through the Central Arizona Project Canal in north Phoenix on August 24, 2026. Arizona will take mandatory cuts of 27% under a new plan to reduce demand for the river’s water. City leaders say they can keep taps flowing after decades of planning. (Alex Hager/KJZZ)

Under the searing desert sun, Max Wilson watched water flow through a canal in north Phoenix. This unassuming strip of blue next to a busy road is the city’s lifeline to the Colorado River. Soon, there will be less water in it.

Wilson, water resources management advisor for the city of Phoenix, has to make sure cuts to this canal’s supply don’t cause taps to go dry for more than 1.7 million people who depend on his system.

He is confident water will keep flowing out of kitchen sinks, showers and sprinklers across the nation’s fifth-largest city.

“Arizonans have been solving water problems for our entire history, and we didn’t forget how to do that overnight,” Wilson said. “We’re going to do it again now.”

The cuts, which kick in on Jan. 1, are the result of a new federal plan for managing the Colorado River. After more than 26 years of drought and climate change sapped the river’s supply, the nation’s two largest reservoirs — Lake Powell and Lake Mead — are at record lows. The seven states that use the river’s water spent years trying to agree on a plan to rein in demand. Those negotiations failed, and the federal government had to step in with its own.

The result is a strategy that includes mandatory cuts of 27% to Arizona’s Colorado River supplies each year through 2028, with an option for steeper cuts after that.

Lake Powell sits low behind Glen Canyon Dam in Page, Arizona on May 14, 2026. Record low water levels at the nation’s second-largest reservoir forced new cutbacks to demand for water from the Colorado River. (Alex Hager/KJZZ)

Now, central Arizona cities are charting a course through a future with less Colorado River water. Water managers across the Phoenix metro say they have robust backup plans in place to keep taps flowing, thanks to years of preparation and huge construction projects. Those upgrades, though, come with a big price tag, and will carry the area into a future that is still rife with uncertainty.

The Central Arizona Project — a system of canals and pumps which carry Colorado River water 336 miles across the desert to the Phoenix and Tucson areas — will be hit the hardest by new cuts. Colorado River water makes up 40% of the supplies Phoenix feeds to its customers.

“The cuts that we’re talking about today will not threaten water deliveries to homes,” Wilson said. “There will never be a moment where you go into your house, you turn on your faucet and no water comes out the other side.”

The very fact that Phoenix and its neighbors can receive water from the Colorado River is a feat of engineering. The canal system that carries it from western Arizona is a gravity-defying product of 1960s optimism and more than $4 billion in building costs.

Soon, with less water in that canal, it will take more feats of engineering to survive. The steep costs of those projects will likely be passed along to residents.

“All those solutions are here, and we know what they are, and we’re working on implementing them,” Wilson said, “They are going to be very expensive. And ultimately, our customers are going to be the ones who have to pay that bill.”

Decades of planning 

Cities say the main reason they can survive Colorado River cuts is the simple fact that they have diverse water portfolios.

When one source is short, they can lean harder on a different one. In the Phoenix area, that is most often the Salt and Verde River system and groundwater.

You wouldn’t know it driving around Phoenix, but the city is built on the banks of a major river.

In the city today, the Salt River is mostly reduced to a wide, dusty trough that passes unceremoniously under freeway bridges. That’s thanks to more than a century of planning and construction stretching back to some of the area’s earliest waves of white settlement.

The Salt River’s first major dam, Roosevelt Dam, was completed in 1911 in an effort to tame erratic flows and wrangle its water for the nascent farming communities downstream. In the century-plus since, Roosevelt was joined by other dams, which now form a chain of reservoirs in the foothills east of Phoenix.

A man runs along the Eastern Canal in Gilbert, Arizona on August 26, 2026. The canal carries water from the Salt River Project. Those supplies are a major part of cities’ response to smaller allocations from the Colorado River. (Alex Hager/KJZZ)

As farming ebbed, the water stored in those reservoirs helped the Valley’s cities and suburbs become one of the nation’s fastest growing urban areas. Now, it will help keep them afloat during epically dry times.

The cuts to Phoenix’s Colorado River allocation are survivable partially because the city gets so much water from the Salt and Verde Rivers, which supply about 58% of the water sent to customers.

Early settlers of the Valley constructed the Salt River’s first dams and laid the groundwork for the area’s future. Throughout the 20th century, water managers built on top of it. In the 1990s, a $430 million project raised the height of Roosevelt Dam and increased its storage capacity by 20%.

Now, 21st century water managers have to invest hundreds of millions more to make sure they can get water from the Salt River system to the places it’s needed. The city of Phoenix spent about $300 million building a “drought pipeline,” which was completed in early 2023 and carries water from the south side of the city to the north.

Before the pipeline, north Phoenix was largely dependent on water from the Colorado River. Phoenix has legal access to Salt River water that it can use to help keep taps flowing for more than 400,000 people in that area, but that water flowed into the south side of the city. The 12-mile pipeline fixes that, but came with a large price tag.

Max Wilson, water resources management advisor for the city of Phoenix, poses next to the Central Arizona Project canal in north Phoenix on August 24, 2026. Wilson said the next round of infrastructure projects needed to adapt to a drier future will be expensive, and ratepayers will foot the bill. (Alex Hager/KJZZ)

Still, Wilson said it was necessary and, in the future, might look like a bargain.

“Three hundred million dollars seemed like a lot of money at the time,” he said. “I think many of the projects that we’re talking about moving forward are not in the hundreds of millions, but are rather in the billions of dollars.”

Doug Dunham, associate director of water resources for EPCOR USA, agrees.

On a recent August morning in Anthem, a master-planned community on the far northern edge of the Phoenix metro, water bubbled up into a large storage pond at a water treatment plant owned by EPCOR, a private utility company.

Dunham explained the system would keep working normally, despite the cuts, for a number of reasons.

“This isn’t new headlines to us,” Dunham said. “Across the Valley, across the state, from Tucson on up, there have been people who’ve been thinking about this and planning for these kinds of things for a long time.”

In EPCOR’s case, that includes big, physical infrastructure — like a system of interconnected pipes that keeps disparate water treatment plants working if one source of water can’t supply enough — along with on-paper access to a special share of Colorado River water.

Colorado River water sits in a holding pond at the EPCOR water treatment facility in Anthem, Arizona on August 25, 2026. (Alex Hager/KJZZ)

The company’s Anthem plant is plugged into the Central Arizona Project canal via a 9-mile pipeline. But the Colorado River water that flows there from the canal will not be cut like many nearby cities. Instead, access to that water is leased from the Ak-Chin Indian Community, which has deep legal protections on its water. It would only be cut off under much steeper reductions, the likes of which are not included in the next few years of Colorado River plans.

Lease deals can be a big part of some utilities’ preparations for times of shortage. Essentially, if a utility’s legal rights to water are on the chopping block, it can go out and buy access to somebody else’s water that is more legally protected.

But the strategies that have worked so far, Dunham said, can only do so much.

“Eventually we’re going to have to do harder, more difficult, and — read into that — more expensive things to make sure that water resources are brought in,” he said. “The next buckets, so to speak, the next sources of water, those projects are going to be very expensive.”

Who pays for it all?

The steep costs of big, new infrastructure will primarily fall on the shoulders of the people who use the water those projects provide. Homes and businesses across the Valley have already seen some of those costs baked into water bills over the years, and they will likely see more increases.

And without a long-term strategy for spreading out those costs, rate hikes can be dramatic.

That has been on display in Gilbert.

The town gets about 41% of its water from the Colorado River, and will lose 20% of that allocation under the upcoming cuts.

For decades, Gilbert has been building contingency plans that will keep water flowing to homes and businesses even during dry times.

In the late 1990s, it built a sprawling nature preserve structured around seven ponds that are designed to help treated wastewater seep underground, filling an aquifer that can provide a backup when there’s not enough water from other sources. Now, it’s nearly done building the wells to get some of that water back.

Ducks float across a pond at the Gilbert Riparian Preserve in Gilbert, Arizona on August 26, 2026. The town built the preserve in the 1990s to add water to underground aquifers. Now, it has hiked water bills to quickly pay for wells that can retrieve some of that water. (Alex Hager/KJZZ)

Gilbert had plans to rebuild its largest water treatment plant and install a network of eight wells to help draw groundwater as part of its strategy to weather a future with less Colorado River water.

Lauren Hixson, the town’s water resources manager, said the wells needed to be fast-tracked to catch up with demand for water. That more aggressive timeline, combined with a Town Council that had skipped increases to water rates in the past, meant Gilbert needed to raise money for its new projects quickly.

As a result, water bills in Gilbert have doubled, roughly, since 2024.

Those steep rate hikes did not land well with customers, Hixson said. Even though they helped fund important infrastructure, she said it was difficult to get people to understand the reason for the increase.

“I think we did our best to get the message out ahead of time, but a lot of people aren’t paying attention until it actually takes place,” she said. “Then they see the bill, and they’re like, ‘Wait, why?’”

Hixson said residents have been getting gradually more receptive as her team explains the need for water system upgrades, but sudden, unexpected rate increases can make it hard for people to appreciate that preparation, despite a local government’s best attempts to get the word out.

“It’s really important for communities to be looking at that really regularly so that there isn’t a big shock,” she said.

Pipes in a well system in Gilbert, Arizona on August 26, 2026. The town’s water manager said other cities should work to spread out infrastructure-related rate hikes so residents aren’t shocked by big increases on water bills. (Alex Hager/KJZZ)

However, some experts see higher water rates as a different part of the solution to shortages.

In the Phoenix area, local utilities rarely force their customers to use less water. Mandatory restrictions on things like lawn watering, for example, are rare.

Kathryn Sorensen, director of research at the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University, said mandatory watering rules may not be necessary if a city can use high water rates to send the message instead.

“I’m not convinced that voluntary or even involuntary water conservation measures necessarily get you a lot of water,” she said. “What does work is a good price signal on what you pay for the water.”

Phoenix’s water department, which Sorensen used to run, charges more for water during the summer. That, she said, makes people think twice about growing a thirsty lawn during the hottest months of the year.

“When people get that bill, they see it and they feel it in their pocketbook,” Sorensen said “That can be really painful, and the change can be immediate. No one wants a $500 water bill in the middle of the summer, right? It works.”

The proof is in the data. Phoenix has brought down peak summertime water use since the 1980s by about 40%, and Sorensen said higher rates are a big part of that.

“Many decades ago, something like 80% of single-family homes had majority grass landscaping,” she said. “Today, within the boundaries of the city of Phoenix, that’s less than 10%. There are these kind of hardcore advocates that just want a lawn. That’s not against the law in Phoenix, but trust me, they pay through the nose for that lawn. Those price signals are really effective.”

Uncertainty lies ahead

For all of their advance planning, water managers are still facing an unpredictable future.

Climate science shows that the massive reservoirs that store the Colorado River are unlikely to fill back up any time soon. Drier conditions are here to stay, and so is the reality that big reductions to demand are the main way for humans to adapt to that future. Climate scientists, policy researchers, environmentalists and most water policymakers generally agree.

But the exact way state and federal governments choose to bring down demand is much less certain.

In the latest set of rules for managing the Colorado River, the federal government gave itself the authority to cut water for Arizona, California and Nevada by up to 40% as soon as 2028. The promise of a roughly 20% cut for those states will only last for a relatively short time.

Visitors look out over the Colorado River at Horseshoe Bend in Page, Arizona on May 14, 2026. A new federal strategy for sharing its water can be tweaked every two years, making it hard for city utility managers to plan ahead. (Alex Hager/KJZZ)

Those rules force decisionmakers back to the negotiating table to tweak cutbacks every two years through 2036. After that, they could throw a curveball to the city utility managers that have to live with the consequences of those cuts.

EPCOR’s Dunham said that can be difficult for someone who might have to build new water treatment plants and storage facilities.

“Those kinds of things take many years to get off the ground and into operating conditions,” Dunham said. “So these short two-year cycles are going to be very, very challenging.”

Not only does the cutback plan leave room for uncertainty, but some parts of cities’ backup plans also have a murky future.

Many Valley cities are part of a water storage program through the Arizona Water Banking Authority. Since the late 1990s, taxpayers have been funding a program to stash extra Colorado River water underground, with the idea that it could be used as a backup in times of shortage.

But the shortage is here, and the Water Bank has locked horns with city leaders over policies to retrieve that water.

Local utilities said the Water Bank should give them access to exactly as much stored water as they lose to mandatory Colorado River cutbacks — essentially providing a one-to-one replacement for the water they lost. The Water Bank argued it would be better to stretch out those supplies for the future, and wanted to give cities some water, but not 100% of the amount they lost to cutbacks.

After a public back-and-forth, the Water Bank agreed to give utilities access to 100% of the water they lost to cutbacks, but only for a year. Those underground backup supplies are a big part of some cities’ plans to adapt to a drier future, but they aren’t certain how much of that water will be available after the yearlong policy expires.

The Central Arizona Project carries Colorado River water past homes in north Phoenix on March 26, 2026. Cities will be able to make up for Colorado River shortages with water they have been storing underground for decades, but a policy from the Arizona Water Banking Authority will only last for a year, making it hard for them to plan beyond that timeframe. (Alex Hager/KJZZ)

In some parts of the Valley, the uncertainty runs much deeper.

Larger, older cities toward the core of the Phoenix metro tend to have more taxpayers, deeper pockets, larger staffs and a long history of securing access to different sources of water. Smaller suburbs and exurbs are often on the other end of the spectrum.

The town of Cave Creek, for example, is in a pinch.

Cave Creek sits in a quiet, saguaro-dotted valley less than an hour northeast of Phoenix. It gets about 95% of its water from the Colorado River. With big cuts to that supply on the way, it has had to move quickly.

With few options and high costs that would be difficult for its small population to fund, the town is working on exchange deals with nearby cities. But those don’t represent a permanent solution.

A consultant for Cave Creek’s water department told KJZZ in April that the city will have “five to eight years” worth of alternatives, and will need longer-term fixes once that time runs out.

The next generation

On the banks of the Central Arizona Project canal in Phoenix, city water manager Max Wilson stood on a gravel road above the steady amble of blue-green water.

He said the work to keep water flowing for the next few years — and for future generations — is already visible. With the ’60s-era concrete canal on one side, he gestured in the other direction, toward a towering construction crane down the street.

“As we stand here,” Wilson said, “what we’re looking at is the confluence of the city’s past and the city’s future.”

Under the crane is the city’s big bet on sustainable supplies for the future. At Phoenix’s Cave Creek Water Reclamation Plant, it’s partway through the construction of a huge facility that will take sewage and clean it up into pure, safe drinking water. It’s part of a massive overhaul at the once-mothballed plant, putting Phoenix at the doorstep of delivering recycled water to homes and businesses for the first time in Arizona history.

Cranes loom above the Cave Creek Water Reclamation Plant in Phoenix, Arizona on March 27, 2026. A massive overhaul of the facility would allow Phoenix to deliver recycled wastewater to city customers, part of an expensive long-term plan to adapt to a drier future. (Alex Hager/KJZZ)

The project is expected to start sending water into city pipes as soon as early 2029. City officials say it could cost more than $359 million to build, and $8.5 million to run and maintain each year.

“Yes, we will have to pay some of those costs,” Wilson said. “But when you think about the benefits, and you think about the fact that our kids and our grandkids are not going to be exposed to the types of shortages that we’re talking about here today, I think it’s worth it.”

By 2033, Phoenix hopes to bring another, even bigger reuse facility online as part of a joint venture with the cities of Mesa and Glendale, as well as EPCOR.

Wilson said the facilities will make the city “more and more drought-proof” going forward.

He also called on the federal government, which has had a big role in helping Western communities adapt to dry times, to help foot the bill for projects like the water recycling facility.

“The federal government made a choice to place this burden entirely on [Arizona, California and Nevada],” he said, “and in making that choice, I think they also made a second choice, which is that they’re going to need to step up and step in to be able to help offset some of these costs moving forward.”

This story was produced by KJZZ and the Mountain West News Bureau, with support from The Water Desk at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Years of Colorado River talks failed to produce a deal. How much should the public see?

By
Rachel Cohen, Mountain West News Bureau
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Interior Secretary Doug Burgum convened Colorado River basin governors in Washington, D.C. before a February deadline for an agreement over the future of the river. After the states failed to reach consensus on their own, the federal government stepping in with a framework this summer. (Credit: U.S. Department of Interior / Flickr)

Two thick, orange, bound books sit on a library table at Colorado State University.

“This is the original compilation,” said Patty Rettig, a water resources archivist at the university. She’s the keeper of the detailed records of another time when states were fighting over how to share the Colorado River.

“You can see here, this is the first 18 sessions, and then we have another volume,” she said, pointing to the second book.

These hundreds of pages hold the transcripts of the 27 meetings that led to the Colorado River Compact in 1922. They provide an important window into the rooms where Western water was divided up.

The verbatim minutes reveal which officials were present – almost always the commissioners from the seven Colorado River states and the federally-appointed chairman Herbert Hoover, and often a handful of state engineers or other leaders. They also document when states disagreed and how, over more than a dozen meetings in Santa Fe in November, they eventually hammered out an agreement.

“In the end, they get to some word-smithing,” said Rettig. “Thankfully, we do have detailed meeting minutes. We can see what concepts they were discussing.”

Colorado State University archivist Patty Rettig sifts through the minutes of the meetings that led to the 1922 Colorado River Compact. The compact, while controversial, has shaped Western water for more than a century. (Credit: Rachel Cohen / KUNC)

Aside from a series of public meetings around the West, the negotiators mostly met in private. But a century later, a public record of how they deliberated over the future of the Colorado River is preserved.

Flash forward to today: for the last three years, the seven states have been negotiating a new set of rules for sharing a dwindling supply of water before current ones expire in December. But the public has had little view inside the negotiating rooms.

John Berggren with the nonprofit Western Resource Advocates said the states would meet virtually or around conference tables in various Western cities.

“But there’s no announcement; there’s no meeting agenda. There’s no minutes that are read out from those meetings,” he said. “The only way you even know they’re happening is you have to know someone who’s there.”

The seven negotiators serve as the governors’ representatives on Colorado River matters and they’re not elected officials. But they play a vital public role in managing a shared resource that 40 million people rely on for drinking water, agriculture, energy, recreation and more.

KUNC requested work calendars for the seven negotiators earlier this year. The information wasn’t always easy to find. Some states – Arizona, New Mexico and Utah – were either not responsive to the requests or their state offices said they didn’t hold the records. Colorado would have charged about $280 for the documents.

California, Nevada and Wyoming responded to the requests. The schedules of those state principals show frequent negotiating meetings, especially in the lead up to a Valentine’s Day deadline to come up with a plan, and in the weeks after that deadline was missed. There were meetings with just the seven principals, several including federal officials from the Bureau of Reclamation, separate meetings for the upper basin and lower basin and huddles of smaller state pairings.

State representatives in the Colorado River negotiations speak on a panel at the Colorado River Water Users Association conference in Las Vegas on December 5, 2024. Over the past few years, appearances at a couple of conferences were among the only times the representatives came together in public. (Credit: Alex Hager / KUNC)

States have said this closed-door process is needed to reach a deal — and it’s worked in the past. But this time, it hasn’t. The tension has only grown. In the absence of an agreement, the federal government has stepped in with its own plan and the state of Nevada has filed a lawsuit.

After following river negotiations as a reporter and now as a researcher at the University of New Mexico, John Fleck has come to appreciate that private spaces are sometimes needed to work out these thorny issues. Some important talks have happened in hallways or hotel bars. But the lack of a state agreement this time around has changed his perspective.

“These people have lost my trust,” he said. “I no longer trust that behind those closed doors they are doing the kind of difficult discussions that need to happen. Instead, we seem to have reached a point now where the lack of transparency provides cover for hiding the accountability for the failures.”

He wants “messy, public conversations.”

Berggren, who studied the topic of transparency in the Colorado River negotiations for his PhD thesis, said completely opening the door to the public would be a “nightmare.” He thinks private space for frank talks is still needed, especially given the complexity and tense nature of the subject. Still, he thinks states should share more with the public about what’s keeping them apart now, beyond usual talking points.

“If more of the public knew what the seven states were doing, in terms of not reaching an agreement and the risk of going to the Supreme Court, I think more people would be upset,” he said. “Like, ‘Hey, my state is not doing everything they can to get to that seven state solution.’”

Plus, the process can leave out some important voices, like the 30 tribes that rely on the river. Back in 1922, the compact talks completely excluded them. At a University of Colorado Boulder conference this summer, Amelia Flores, the chairwoman of the Colorado River Indian Tribes, said the inclusion of tribal nations has improved.

For example, an agreement between six upper basin tribes and the Upper Colorado River Commission stipulates regular meetings and California’s governor appointed a tribal elected leader to its Colorado River Board.

But Flores said tribes are still not always treated as “true partners.”

“Make no mistakes, the failure to fully engage tribal nations in this process, leaving us to react to the decisions made by others, is a threat to our inherent sovereignty and to our very existence,” she said.

State level negotiators say they represent a wide range of constituents, and they go through different processes, depending on the state, to report back to stakeholders.

Becky Mitchell, Colorado’s river negotiator, told KUNC earlier this year that there are also challenges in explaining publicly all of the finer details of the negotiations.

“It’s not just one issue,” she said. “It’s how we move forward things as a package, and so we’re trying to be aware of that and not impede the ability for later progress.”

Jim Lochhead has been in her shoes as Colorado’s negotiator through the early 2000s. He also agreed that there are good reasons for closed-door negotiations among states.

“The negotiators need to be free to float ideas, to maybe reach tentative agreements on certain elements of the overall negotiation, to be able to have open communications, and that requires confidentiality and a closed door,” he said.

But he thinks the negotiations have recently gotten too politicized and said the balance between confidentiality and transparency is off. He said the states need a reset and to focus on their shared interest in managing a shrinking river – whenever those talks may resume.

Scott Franz contributed reporting.

This story was produced by KUNC and the Mountain West News Bureau, with support from The Water Desk at the University of Colorado Boulder.

If Colorado River compact heads to Supreme Court, ‘everybody loses,’ experts say

By
Ishan Thakore, Colorado Public Radio
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The Colorado River flows through Eagle County, north of Dotsero. July 22, 2026. (Kevin J. Beaty / Denverite)

The drama engulfing the seven states in the Colorado River Basin could take another, more perilous turn in a few weeks.  

Water experts are warning that by October, the river’s flow may cross a critical threshold at Lee’s Ferry, a bend in the river in Arizona that has been a bellwether of the river’s health for decades. The 1922 Colorado River Compact — the river’s foundational agreement — states that the river’s flow must stay above a certain level at Lee’s Ferry in order to provide enough water for downstream states. 

If the flow falls below that point, which some experts equate to a “tripwire,” it could trigger prolonged and expensive litigation at the Supreme Court, a turning point that could have terrible consequences for basin states. 

“I can’t imagine what the Front Range of Colorado would look like at that point,” said Darren Beck, a water program supervisor for Boulder County Parks and Open Space, of the prospect of huge cuts to their Colorado River water. 

“It would just be dry fields and weeds and decimated economies and families.”

The Colorado River near Lees Ferry, Arizona, on Dec. 27, 2019. (Mitch Tobin / The Water Desk)

Tensions along the Colorado River have already run high this year — a historic drought, following record-breaking winter temperatures, has threatened water supplies for communities across the West that rely on the river and its tributaries.

For more than three years, the seven states in the Colorado River Basin have been unable to reach a deal to share increasingly scarce water. In August, the federal government issued its own plan to save water, which foisted massive water cuts on Arizona, Nevada and California. 

Nevada officials called the cuts draconian, and the state has already sued the Bureau of Reclamation over the plan. 

A Supreme Court case and ruling could impose even more dire cuts, and lead to bitter disputes for decades. A ruling could, for instance, force cities, farmers and ranchers in Colorado to slash their water use, leading to painful decisions. 

“We’re talking about a really significant portion of this state’s water supply being unavailable for five or 10 or 15 years to make up [for] a bad court decision,” said Andy Mueller, general manager of the Colorado River Water Conservation District, during a June hearing to state lawmakers.

Darren Beck, a water program supervisor with Boulder County Parks and Open Space, stands at Louisville’s Hecla Lake Open Space, which he had to help replenish after a very dry summer. Aug. 12, 2026. (Kevin J. Beaty / Denverite)

Both upper and lower basin states are lawyering up. Colorado Attorney General and gubernatorial candidate, Phil Weiser, said his office would defend the state’s rights, and has insisted his lawyers are now the “best…water law firm in the state.” 

But Michael L. Connor, who led the Bureau of Reclamation under President Obama, said a Supreme Court case would create more headaches and not solve the river’s fundamental problem: there is less water to go around. 

“If there is Supreme Court litigation over the compact, everybody loses,” he said. 

At stake is who decides how to divide up an ever-shrinking pool of water. Will it be state negotiators, who represent millions of people and could still one day reach an agreement? 

Or will it be nine justices in black robes? 

“Handing the ability to decide really important questions about the operation of the Colorado River to nine people — who don’t know much about it —  is very risky business,” said Anne Castle, a scholar at CU-Boulder Law School and former chair of the Upper Colorado River Commission, which represents the Upper Basin states. 

The Colorado River flows near Palisade, Colorado, just after sunrise on Aug. 17, 2026. (Larry Robinson / Colorado Public Radio News)

One lawsuit down, more potentially on the way 

Lawsuits over the river’s management are already flying in federal court. 

In August, the Bureau of Reclamation finalized its two-year plan to release water from Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the country’s two largest reservoirs. The plan is a short-term attempt to deal with a long-term reality: since 2000, the river’s flow has declined by about 20%, and Mead and Powell are at their lowest levels since the 1950s. 

Besides states, tribes could also sue over Reclamation’s plan. 

The entire river basin is home to 30 federally recognized tribes, who are legally entitled to more than 25% of the river’s water. But many of those rights have never been fully recognized, and many tribes can’t access all of their water because they lack the expensive infrastructure to redirect it. 

Still, “the feds absolutely have a duty to tribes to protect their water interests,” said Heather Tanana, a tribal water law expert at the University of Denver. That stems back to a 1908 Supreme Court decision, which ruled that tribal reservations should have enough water to function. 

While that has hardly been achieved, some tribes downstream could argue that Reclamation’s latest plan violates the government’s responsibility by slashing their water supplies, Tanana said. 

Arizona is poised to take the lion’s share of water cuts, which would affect the Gila River Indian Community, near Phoenix.

Gila River Governor Stephen Roe Lewis said the tribe is poised to sue if water cuts become too extreme, even though litigation is not their first choice. 

“The community … will not hesitate to turn to the courts to protect our interests and our future,” he said at a CU-Boulder water conference in June.

A trip-wire in an unsettled document 

The 1922 compact allocates an equal amount of water between the Upper Basin and Lower Basin — 7.5 million acre-feet per year. One acre-foot is roughly enough water for two households a year. 

The compact is an inherently incomplete document — it took more than a dozen new laws, agreements and settlements over the next 50 years to build out the River’s complicated system of dams, diversions and reservoirs, and even include tribes and Mexico in the process. 

The compact clearly states that the Upper Basin will not cause the river’s flow at Lee Ferry (now called Lee’s Ferry) to drop below 75 million acre-feet of water over any 10 year period. 

The Upper Basin also has to kick in roughly half of what’s owed to Mexico, based on the compact and a 1944 treaty. That brings the 10-year-total to between 82.5 and 81.5 million acre-feet, depending on how much water is being sent to Mexico, according to Castle and Eric Kuhn, a river historian and former general manager of the Colorado River District. (The Upper Basin, for their part, strongly disputes they owe this much).  

A river gauge at Lee’s Ferry, Arizona, on Dec. 27, 2019. (Mitch Tobin / The Water Desk)

Flows at Lee Ferry have dipped below that amount before, in the 1960s and ‘70s, but in much different circumstances. During that period, Reclamation was filling Lake Powell, and the river still had plenty of water to go around, according to Kuhn. 

For decades since then, flows have steered well clear of that range. But officials at the Upper Colorado River Commission and the Arizona Reconsultation Committee, which advises state officials, estimate that by October, the river’s 10-year-flow will dip below 82.5 million acre feet. 

“We call that the first tripwire,” Kuhn said. “That’s when the flows are below the upper bookend of how much the upper division states might owe.” 

Crossing the tripwire could be a watershed moment — Arizona’s top river negotiator said it could be the basis of a Supreme Court lawsuit, one that argues that their upstream neighbors are violating the compact.

Potential decades in a black box

If history is any guide, Supreme Court water cases move at a glacial place — often taking decades to resolve — and can end with clear winners and losers. 

In 1952, Arizona sued California to secure more water and question aspects of the compact. It was the last time that the compact’s fundamental questions came anywhere close to being litigated between states. 

Arizona eventually triumphed, which paved the way for the construction of the Central Arizona Project, which now provides water to farms, tribes and desert metropolises, including Phoenix. The case, though, took 11 years to get to a ruling — additional decrees were issued more than 50 years later. 

It took more than five years just to decide which other parties should join Texas v. New Mexico and Colorado, a 2013 suit about the Rio Grande River, according to Castle. It took more than 12 years for the Supreme Court to approve a settlement. 

John Berggren, a river expert at the advocacy group Western Resource Advocates, said that litigation wastes time and cuts off cooperation that’s needed to create long-term solutions in the basin. 

“It will definitely stymie any creative thinking — or any new thinking — because all seven states are going to be very much towing their legal line,” he said. “It just locks up every conversation and you’re no longer having useful or productive negotiations.” 

Plus, no one actually knows how such a case would end. Colorado has ended up at the Supreme Court to fend off claims that it overused its share of water from both the Arkansas and Republican rivers. Both those cases have taken decades — and did not always break Colorado’s way. 

“Our experience in the litigation around the Arkansas River Compact and the Republican River Compact has not had happy endings for Colorado,” said Castle. 

“The point is that once litigation is started, you don’t know exactly where it’s going to end,” she said. 

The endgame

For years, the Upper Basin states have said that they can’t agree to mandatory water cuts, because they’re at the mercy of whatever rain or snow falls that year. Last winter, Colorado experienced record-low snowpack, which strained water supplies. 

Several towns near the river’s headwaters came extremely close to running out of drinking water. On the Front Range, water supplies that are normally flush were sporadic or non-existent. 

Take Hecla Lake, a small pond in Louisville, Colorado. By the early summer, the lake was “bone-dry,” because drought conditions had reduced its normal supply to a trickle, according to Beck, the Boulder County water supervisor. 

By August, though, Hecla had received a much needed infusion of water from the Colorado River headwaters. But that water was only temporary, destined to flow to a small, parched farm nearby. Without it, Beck said, the farm would have gone dry. 

Lake Hecla is dried up in Louisville. July 7, 2026. (Courtesy of Darren Beck / Water Program Supervisor Boulder County Parks & Open Space Agricultural Resources Division)

Attorney General Phil Weiser and Becky Mitchell, Colorado’s top river negotiator, both seem confident in their approach to protect Colorado water users. Both have said the state would never agree to a “bad deal” to divide up water. 

“I am not willing to offer a compromise that would leave us worse off than our worst day in court,” Mitchell told state lawmakers during a June hearing. 

A worst case outcome, according to Castle and Kuhn, would be if the Supreme Court, or a court-appointed expert, made a quick decision and ordered the Upper Basin states to send more water downstream. That would lead to what’s called “mandatory curtailment,” or cutting off users with water rights that were formalized after the 1922 compact.

That is a lot of water — it includes water for Denver and other Front Range cities, water for snowmaking at ski resorts, and supplies for hundreds of communities and farms across the Western Slope.

Neither Mitchell nor Weiser have publicly detailed the particulars of the state’s litigation strategy. The AG’s office denied a CPR News public records request for recent documents about Colorado River litigation, and did not comment on questions about its strategy. 

But the state is preparing. The Colorado Water Conservation Board has millions in cash in case of compact litigation, according to Lawrence Pacheco, a spokesperson for the AG’s office. Attorneys and staff in the office have also billed the state for nearly 18,000 hours of work on Colorado River issues this year, according to Pacheco. 

Their approach, though, is running into some pushback from lawmakers. During a June hearing, state senator Dylan Roberts sharply questioned why the state was leaning on lawyers to defend its position, instead of working towards a compromise that avoids a courtroom.

“I don’t think Colorado fares well when we go to court…throwing our fate to the nine justices on the U.S. Supreme Court, only one of whom has any experience with Colorado at all,” Roberts told Mitchell, referring to Justice Neil M. Gorsuch. 

Kuhn said the state should have agreed to a specific target of water conservation during earlier negotiations, instead of holding firm. That could have staved off the possibility of much more painful, forced curtailment later.

“My concern is that Colorado backed the basin into a corner with that position,” Kuhn said. “What Colorado’s position is doing is forcing the other states to become a little bit more aggressive.” 

No one exactly knows how mandatory curtailment would even work. Last year, the state began “listening sessions” with groups of water users, to figure out what Colorado would do if the Upper Basin was ordered to comply with the compact, according to Jason Ullmann, the state’s top water engineer.  

This story was produced by Colorado Public Radio and the Mountain West News Bureau, with support from The Water Desk at the University of Colorado Boulder.

At Glen Canyon Dam, Trump administration privileges hydropower over ecosystems

By
Brett Walton, Circle of Blue
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Glen Canyon Dam, which holds back the waters of Lake Powell, has emerged as a significant water supply choke point in the Colorado River basin. (Brett Walton/Circle of Blue)

In the struggling Colorado River basin, where water is scarce, the White House has signaled its priorities for how to use the remaining gallons.

Even as scientifically-determined thresholds have been met for releasing water from Glen Canyon Dam for ecological and recreational benefits in Grand Canyon, the Trump administration has decided against those actions in this record-hot year – deciding not to release cold water from deep in Lake Powell to aid the humpback chub, a threatened fish species, and not to authorize a high-volume release of water to rebuild Grand Canyon’s eroded beaches, which are in terrible condition, according to federal monitoring.

These environmental releases would not change the total volume of water flowing out of Lake Powell over the year, just the timing.

Because the releases bypass the dam’s turbines and reduce hydropower generation, which is part of the administration’s “energy dominance” agenda, the Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency that manages Glen Canyon Dam, will not be doing them.

“After evaluating management alternatives and considering all authorized purposes, the decision was made based on significant hydropower generation concerns under already strained system conditions,” Reclamation said in a statement in August.

The administration’s decisions foreshadow more difficult choices ahead. Due to climate change and overuse, the Colorado River is shrinking and warming. Its dams were built and river management goals were laid out during an era that anticipated healthy reservoirs. That is no longer the case. Because Lake Powell and Lake Mead are about a quarter of their capacity or less, the hydrological assumptions that inform current management strategies are outdated, said Jack Schmidt, a scientist who has spent his four-decade career studying the Colorado River.

“Everything needs to be revisited because the driving factors of the Colorado River ecosystem in Grand Canyon are now completely changed and probably forever changed,” said Schmidt of Utah State University’s Center for Colorado River Studies. “Everything was developed in a world of full reservoirs. And now the reservoirs are empty.”

Tradeoffs plague water managers

Even in the best of times, managing a large dam on a major river is not easy. Dams alter the river’s natural patterns of flow and temperature. Operators must weigh one set of benefits against another group of costs.

Glen Canyon Dam is one of the thorniest management conundrums. Located near the Arizona-Utah border, the 63-year-old structure has emerged as the most significant water-supply choke point in the Colorado River basin and it is the focus of clamorous debate about water and power infrastructure in a drier climate.

The Colorado River strikes a bright jade color as it flows through Marble Canyon, in northern Arizona, a few miles downstream of the Paria River, a significant source of sand for the Grand Canyon. (Brett Walton/Circle of Blue)

As managers grapple with how much water to release, Glen Canyon Dam is also choking the river of its natural supply of sediment. Without new inputs, sand bars and beaches in Grand Canyon are at risk of disappearing. These features provide habitat, give boaters a place to camp during river trips, and protect archaeological sites.

Most of the river’s sediment now comes from the Paria River and Little Colorado River, downstream of Glen Canyon. Periodic high-flow water releases from the dam mimic the thunderous floods of the past that carried sediment through Grand Canyon to fortify eroding beaches.

There is enough sediment in the Colorado River below Glen Canyon today to warrant a high-flow release. Yet Reclamation has not done one since 2023. Experts agree that Reclamation is highly unlikely to conduct one this fall either. A final decision will be made in the next few weeks.

The need for a high-flow release is mounting. In August, David Topping, a research hydrologist at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Grand Canyon Monitoring and Research Center, presented data showing the ill health of Grand Canyon beaches. A typical sand bar is smaller now than in 2016, when the current management plan that established the high-flow triggers was finalized.

The lack of high-flow releases has deprived researchers of crucial data on how the size and duration of these mini-floods, usually one to four days in length, aid beach-building.

“What can we do if the administration isn’t willing to allow us to use the bypass tubes for high-flow experiments, if that’s going to be off the table, at least for a while?” said Wayne Pullan, Reclamation’s Upper Colorado Region director, at a Glen Canyon management meeting in August, asking attendees to consider management options under political constraints.

“We’re in a pinch point,” Pullan added. “A real pinch point.”

Raft trip on the Colorado River through Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona, in 2019. (Ted Wood/The Water Desk)

Degraded beaches result in a degraded river experience, said David Brown of the Grand Canyon River Guides, a recreation advocacy group. Rafting groups have to compete for limited real estate in what is generally regarded as one of the world’s premier river corridors.

“When there’s less campable area, that means everyone’s kind of getting squished together or your toilet is next to where people are sleeping,” Brown said.

Non-native species thrive in warm water

In addition to sediment, water temperature is the other blinking red environmental indicator.

Air temperature records in the basin are being obliterated this year. Colorado, home to the river’s headwaters, had its hottest summer ever. Scorching air temperatures are reflected in water. The Colorado River below Lake Powell is the warmest since Glen Canyon Dam was completed.

Smallmouth bass were introduced as a sport fish in the upper Colorado River basin in the late 1960s. Voracious feeders, smallmouth bass view other fish as the sport, happily preying on threatened native species like the humpback chub, an eighteen-inch fish in Grand Canyon with a distinctive smooshed silhouette.

Listed as endangered in 1967, the humpback chub has now bounced back thanks to tens of millions of dollars of conservation investment. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service upgraded the humpback chub to “threatened” status in 2018.

Smallmouth bass live in Lake Powell, preferring the layer of warm water closest to the surface. As the lake shrinks, that warm layer has now reached the level of the penstocks, which pull water into Glen Canyon Dam’s turbines for hydropower generation before being released downstream.

In these low-water conditions, the fear is that more smallmouth bass will be delivered into the Colorado River below Glen Canyon.

Once there, they will find a habitable environment. Smallmouth bass spawn when water temperatures exceed 60 degrees Fahrenheit. This year, that mark was breached in June. Today, the river at Lees Ferry, about 16 miles downstream of Glen Canyon Dam, is about 70 F.

These conditions – when the river temperature is above 60 F for three consecutive days – are supposed to trigger a release of cold water from deep in Lake Powell. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says that this “cool mix” is the “only conservation measure proven to limit smallmouth bass reproduction.” Evidence from cool mix releases in 2024 and 2025, which knocked down smallmouth bass numbers, supports that conclusion.

Glen Canyon Dam’s powerhouse holds the electricity-generating turbines. (Brett Walton/Circle of Blue)

Cool mix, however, will not happen in 2026 due to the Trump administration’s desire to generate hydropower.

The last cool mix flow, in 2025, cost the Western Area Power Administration, which markets federal hydropower, $6.1 million to replace that electricity for its contractors.

Instead of cool mix, Reclamation says it is focusing on other options to keep smallmouth bass from establishing downstream of Glen Canyon and to preserve the humpback chub’s hard-won conservation gains. In the short term that means stunning the bass with electric-shock tools and physically removing them from the water.

In the longer term, Reclamation is considering installing infrastructure to regulate the temperature of the water that passes through Glen Canyon. The agency calls this one of its “durable structural solutions.”

An uncertain future

Cool mix and high-flow releases are an attempt to rebalance an ecosystem that the dams destabilized. Congress passed the Grand Canyon Protection Act of 1992, which orders Reclamation to operate Glen Canyon Dam in a manner that protects and reduces harm to the “natural and cultural resources and visitor use.” That is, fish, tribal archaeological sites, and rafting.

The act required an environmental impact statement for Glen Canyon Dam that would analyze the actions required to achieve the broad environmental-protection goals set by Congress.

It was a “compromise to really put all the resources on the same playing field,” said Jen Pelz of the Grand Canyon Trust. In her view, decisions this year tilt in one direction – hydropower. “I don’t feel like they’re being balanced right now.”

Because the river guides were instrumental in lobbying for Grand Canyon protections, the present-day failures to uphold the act’s goals are all the more galling, Brown said. “It’s very hard to watch it get ignored.”

The administration is prioritizing hydropower when hydropower is at a pivot point.

Generation at Glen Canyon is down more than 40% from when Lake Powell was full. Utilities are turning to solar and wind to cover some of the generation losses, while utility-scale batteries are helping to replace the capacity and grid-regulating functions that a large dam provides.

The decision to favor hydropower over ecology reflects bigger problems with the Colorado River’s infrastructure. Glen Canyon Dam is not designed for the river as it exists today. Reclamation wants to keep Lake Powell high enough to generate hydropower because the dam’s other outlets to deliver water downstream are untested over long periods and were damaged in a previous high-flow release.

Lower basin states and tribes, including Arizona, California, Nevada, and the Gila River Indian Community, have asked the federal government to update Glen Canyon’s infrastructure for water delivery and power generation. Reclamation is assessing three options and expects that study to be released in early 2027. Any additional action will require congressional approval and funding.

Along with the infrastructure problems, man-made climate change is sapping the river and heating up its water. Ecologists consider the Grand Canyon a “novel ecosystem,” meaning its native species and natural processes have been disrupted and rearranged by human meddling.

To Schmidt, the former chief of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Grand Canyon Monitoring and Research Center, this suggests a wholesale rethinking not just of the river’s infrastructure but also of our ecological goals for the Colorado River.

“We as a society get to play God in deciding what attributes of that ecosystem we value, which ones we want to work hard to preserve and which ones we don’t,” he said. “The answer is not an obvious one.”

This story was produced by Circle of Blue, in partnership with The Water Desk at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Environmental Journalism.

For full Colorado River basin coverage, visit our Colorado River page.

The Colorado River got so low, rafting companies canceled this popular trip for the first time

By
Julie Jag, The Salt Lake Tribune
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Volunteers paddle through Westwater Canyon during a National Public Lands Day cleanup trip, where participants joined Bureau of Land Management river rangers to remove trash and invasive weeds from the canyon last September. (Bureau of Land Management)

Most river rafting operators dabble in soothsaying. Every day, sometimes every hour, they closely study river flows and try to predict what kind of adventure Mother Nature has in store for them and their guests.

This season, it was easy. Seeing how little snowpack the mountains held this spring after Utah experienced its warmest winter on record, river guides collectively expected the worst. And they were right.

For the first time in their decades-long histories, at least two rafting companies earlier this month had to cancel trips through Utah’s Westwater Canyon due to the Colorado River’s low flows. One of them, Holiday River Expeditions, also had to halt its trips down the Yampa River in early June — nearly a month ahead of the norm — because of low river flows. One longtime river guide said he knows of some outfitters in Colorado who gave up on rafting before the summer even started.

“If there ever was a year that you’re like, ‘Oh, is this the bottom?’ Or ‘Where is the bottom?’” said Jason Taylor, operations manager for Western River Expeditions and a Moab city council member. “It is this year.”

Utah rafting outfitters aren’t wringing their hands over the future of their business like a client wrings out his shirt after plunging into a Class IV rapid, though. They say a number of factors have buoyed Utah’s rafting industry — at least through this summer.

First time in 60 years

The two- or three-day tour of Westwater Canyon, located in east-central Utah, rides the Colorado River through black canyon walls and over Class III and IV rapids. Western River Expeditions runs it from May through September, and Taylor said it has always been reliable. If he had to cancel a trip there, it was because there was too much water. Still, he worried that this would be the year Westwater tours got shut down.

That day came Aug. 4 when water levels slumped to 1,080 cubic feet per second. That’s the slowest Tim Gaylord has ever seen the river move.

“We’ve been doing this for 60 years,” said Gaylord, the operations manager for Holiday River Expeditions, which has bases in Green River and Vernal. “It’s the first time we stopped running a trip in there due to [low] water levels.”

Taylor said he had to cancel three trips. Gaylord canceled about five. In both cases, the outfitters were able to reschedule most of their clients for the same time on another section or on a trip on the Green River, which has benefited this summer from the release of water from Flaming Gorge to boost water levels at the shrinking Lake Powell.

Flaming Gorge Dam, on Friday, Aug. 14, 2026. (Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune)

Both Western and Holiday are larger outfitters that run multiple trips on multiple rivers at a time. Taylor and Gaylord said that flexibility may give them an advantage over smaller outfitters in dry years.

Another outfitter that only offers trips on the Sevier River, for example, said it had to cancel more than half its rafting days this summer. Low water wasn’t the only reason. Fires scared some clients off and operators opted to not run trips in the stinky muck deposited into the river by floods.

“The rivers are … let’s just say they’re not themselves this year,” said Mike DeHoff, executive director of the Moab-based Colorado Plateau River Guides, who has been running Utah’s rivers for 30 years.

The math of water allocation

Though it was unprecedented, both Taylor and Gaylord predicted this might be the year Westwater met its match. Same with the Yampa.

Gaylord said Holiday pulled trips out of the Yampa almost a month ahead of normal. The fate of rafting there was easier to foresee because it is one of the Colorado River’s few tributaries that isn’t dammed. So, its flow mostly mirrors the snowpack.

With most other raftable rivers in Utah, more factors are at play. Flows depend on agricultural demand and the construction of data centers and urban developments, among other variables. This year, the release of water from Flaming Gorge has kept water levels elevated in the Green River and in the lower parts of the Colorado below where the two merge, even during the drier summer months.

Water agencies typically do not inform rafting companies when they intend to release water from dams, however, which can cause some consternation among outfitters. What really frustrates them, though, is that the basic math behind the allocation of water from the Colorado River doesn’t math. The original 1922 Colorado River Compact allocated 15 million acre-feet of water out of the river, but modern flows have been closer to 12.5 million acre-feet or lower.

“There’s no doubt that there’s overconsumption of the river,” Gaylord said, “and you take a low water year like this, and it’s just hard to keep up with it all: Farmers and the ranchers, they — everybody — needs their piece of it, and here we are trying to figure it out.”

Among the low Colorado River flows, though, one small silver lining has begun to surface in lower Cataract Canyon, near the mouth of Lake Powell. As water levels in the lake drop, several rapids have popped up.

DeHoff has been chronicling the reappearance of the water features as the lead investigator for the Returning Rapids Project, which bills itself as a “citizen science initiative” that operates under the nonprofit Glen Canyon Institute. DeHoff said he attributes the initial disappearance of those rapids to poor legislative and resource management decisions. While he’s glad to see the rapids return, he said he would rather it be the product of policy changes than climate changes.

Hite Marina, long closed down due to the declining water levels of Lake Powell, is pictured from the Colorado River overlook on Saturday, April 25, 2026. (Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune)

“Some people are like, ‘You guys are just cheering on the drought,’ and that’s not really the case,” he said. “It’s more like the further our research team goes down the road of trying to do all this investigation into what’s happening, the more it points out that we’re just not managing this really important resource to the degree we should.”

’Don’t give up on our rivers’

Despite historic-low river flows and canceled trips, river outfitters don’t seem down on the season.

“It was not as bad as we thought it possibly could have gotten in April, when we started looking at the snowpack and what was going on,” Taylor said.

The excess water in the Green River helped outfitters who hold permits for that river and areas below. And thanks to monsoons in Colorado, Westwater was only offline for larger rafts for about a week. Outfitters with smaller rafts continued to run trips through it even during the water slump.

Plus, Gaylord noted, most of Holiday’s clients book well ahead of time and do not closely monitor river flows. He expects numbers to be down across the industry, but said the falloff shouldn’t be drastic.

Next year, though, will be harder to predict.

A super El Niño weather system may pad this winter’s snowpack, which should increase river flows. However, outfitters also expect more water than usual will be held back from the Green River to refill Flaming Gorge. They also fear that news of this year’s low flows will make guests hesitant to book future trips.

Amid the uncertainty, DeHoff said he could offer one surety to those considering a river trip:

“I would tell everybody: ‘Don’t give up on our rivers; they’re still out there,’” he said. “It’s a wonderful way to recreate. It might just change a little bit.”

This story was produced in partnership with The Water Desk, an independent reporting initiative at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Environmental Journalism.

‘Pain and suffering’: What the feds’ Lake Powell proposal means for Utah and other Colorado River states

By
Brooke Larsen, The Salt Lake Tribune
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A boat makes its way to Bullfrog Marina on Lake Powell as high water marks indicate how much the reservoir has receded on Friday, April 24, 2026. (Francisco Kjolseth / The Salt Lake Tribune)

This story was originally published by The Salt Lake Tribune on August, 12, 2026.

After years of analysis and stalled negotiations, the federal government last month finally laid out its proposal for managing the Colorado River’s biggest reservoirs for the next decade.

The Bureau of Reclamation still needs to release its final decision and an operating plan for the next two years. But its final environmental impact statement provides a framework for how it intends to manage parts of the Colorado River system under its control.

The new plan would mean changes in how much water is stored and released from Lake Powell, voluntary water conservation in Utah and other Upper Basin states, and potentially steep water cuts in the Lower Basin — Arizona, California and Nevada.

Current guidelines for managing the reservoirs expire at the end of this year and Reclamation needs a new plan in place by Oct. 1. Reclamation said its preference was to implement a seven-state consensus deal, but so far states have yet to agree.

How Reclamation and states manage the river system affects 40 million people across seven U.S. states, 30 federally recognized tribes and northern Mexico.

Here’s why the latest framework matters and what you need to know:

It still might not be enough in a drying West

The Colorado River Basin has been mired in drought for more than two decades, and research shows that area will likely only get warmer and drier.

The question that really matters is how the new plan operates in a dry world, said Jack Schmidt, senior research scientist at Utah State University’s Center for Colorado River Studies.

Glen Canyon Dam and high-voltage transmission towers in Page, Ariz. on Tuesday, May 20, 2025. (Trent Nelson / The Salt Lake Tribune)

The document gives Reclamation flexibility to respond to an uncertain, but likely drier, river basin. It doesn’t solve all issues, though.

If drought conditions don’t improve, Reclamation said in its analysis that “even large and unprecedented reductions may be needed and may not be enough to stabilize storage” at Lake Powell and Lake Mead.

“The scary thing about all of this is that none of this solves the problem if the world keeps getting drier,” Schmidt said. “That should be taken as an enormous warning for the desperate need to reduce the impact of a warming planet and the drying of the Colorado River Basin.”

What does it mean for Utah?

Reclamation’s framework sets a goal of 200,000 acre-feet of voluntary water conservation in Utah and other Upper Basin states — Colorado, New Mexico and Wyoming.

Gene Shawcroft, Utah’s Colorado River negotiator, said it will likely take Utah and its upstream neighbors three to five years to conserve that amount.

The voluntary target for the Upper Basin is “moving in the right direction,” said John Berggren, regional policy manager for Western Resource Advocates.

But he also hopes those states conserve more than 200,000 acre-feet. “Every state is going to have to do whatever it can to find every acre-foot if we’re going to make it through some of the hydrologies that we’re going to see in the future,” he said.

A tour boat at Lees Ferry in Marble Canyon, Ariz., on Tuesday, May 20, 2025. (Trent Nelson / The Salt Lake Tribune)

Under Reclamation’s proposed framework, Upper Basin states and tribes will have “equal access” to store up to 3 million acre-feet of conserved water in Lake Powell. That stored water can be used for transactions with other Upper Basin users, and tribes would receive credit for their contributions to the pool.

Crystal Tulley-Cordova, a principal hydrologist for the Navajo Nation, said the pool is an “innovative solution” and “opportunity” for her tribe.

Reclamation’s framework does not detail how the process will work, but Tulley-Cordova said tribes and Upper Basin states have started discussing it.

Reclamation only includes voluntary measures in the Upper Basin because the federal government doesn’t believe it has the responsibility or authority to force water shortages in the Upper Basin, said Sarah Porter, director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University.

Upper Basin states have argued that they take “mandatory cuts” each year based on how much water actually flows in the river and its upstream tributaries.

“We get cuts from Mother Nature every year,” Shawcroft said.

House boats are pictured at Bullfrog Marina on Lake Powell on Saturday, April 25, 2026. Glen Canyon National Recreation Area officials plan to move the marina to the deeper waters in the main channel of the reservoir across from Halls Crossing. (Francisco Kjolseth / The Salt Lake Tribune)

What about California and other Lower Basin states?

In contrast to Reclamation’s limited role in the Upper Basin, the Interior Secretary is considered the “water master” in the Lower Basin and controls the delivery of Colorado River water to Arizona, California and Nevada from Lake Mead.

“The measures that [the bureau] believes it has the authority to impose could have very dramatic impacts on the Lower Basin,” Porter said.

Cuts could be as large as 3 million acre-feet in those states during dry years, according to the federal government’s framework. That’s almost double what those states have offered to conserve in a Lower Basin proposal released earlier this year.

Lower Basin shortages would hit Arizona, which is home to 22 of the 30 federally recognized tribes in the Colorado River Basin, particularly hard. During the driest conditions, the state could see its Colorado River allocation cut by as much as 77% under Reclamation’s proposal.

The Arizona Department of Water Resources called the potential cuts “unacceptable” and said “such reductions would devastate Arizona’s water users and its economy.”

The Gila River Indian Community, which holds substantial rights in Arizona, said in a statement that Reclamation’s proposal “fails to adequately address the federal government’s trust responsibility to tribes in the Basin who are seriously affected by cuts to critical water supplies.”

“The community has forcefully made its case to the federal government throughout this process that it cannot simply take our water without our consent,” the statement said.

High winds kick up the wake of a rental pontoon boat during a tour of Lake Powell on Sunday, April 26, 2026. (Francisco Kjolseth / The Salt Lake Tribune)

Ten of the 11 tribes with unresolved water rights in the basin are also in Arizona, said Cora Tso, senior research fellow at the Kyl Center for Water Policy and member of the Navajo Nation.

“They’re left to wonder what water will be left over for them to negotiate and ultimately bring to their community members, to fulfill the purpose of their reservation, to sustain a permanent homeland,” Tso said

“We’re talking about getting clean water access to people’s homes,” Tso added, “and making sure that those who are hit hardest with impacts from climate change have the adequate resources to help mitigate those impacts.”

Reclamation prioritizes dam infrastructure

Reclamation’s framework aims to stop water levels at Powell and Mead from dropping so low that it could cause damage to Glen Canyon Dam and Hoover Dam.

“There’s enough room within this framework for Reclamation to ensure that the reservoirs avoid a truly catastrophic outcome,” said Doug Kenney, western water policy program director at Colorado University Boulder’s Getches-Wilkinson Center. “But of course the only tool that they have to do that is to cut off water users, and so there’s going to be pain and suffering somewhere, and that pain and suffering is primarily aimed at Arizona.”

The new framework also reduces possible water releases out of Lake Powell from the current low level release of 6 million acre-feet to 5 million acre-feet to protect Glen Canyon Dam.

“The document makes clear that Reclamation will continue doing everything it takes to prop up Lake Powell, including releasing as much water as they can from Flaming Gorge,” Eric Balken, executive director of the Glen Canyon Institute, told the Tribune.

Reclamation includes the “potential for maximum use of” Colorado River reservoirs upstream of Powell, including Flaming Gorge, to protect dam infrastructure.

Reclamation wants to keep Powell above 3,500 feet. At 3,490, the reservoir hits “minimum power pool,” where the dam can no longer produce hydropower and water must go downstream through lower tubes that weren’t intended for sustained water releases.

Hydropower generated from Glen Canyon Dam, and other dams part of the Colorado River Storage Project, provides electricity to over 50 tribal nations. That includes about 42% of the Navajo Tribal Utility Authority’s total electric supply, according to the Congressional Research Service.

As the Colorado River continues to downcut, construction of a new North Wash takeout near Hite Crossing brings much needed respite for boaters exiting excursions down Cataract Canyon, Friday, April 24, 2026. (Francisco Kjolseth / The Salt Lake Tribune)

Risk of litigation

Such low releases could trigger what’s known as a “compact call” from Lower Basin states.

The century-old Colorado River Compact says that the Upper Basin States “will not cause the flow of the river at Lee Ferry” — the dividing line between the basins just below Glen Canyon Dam — to fall below an aggregate of 75 million acre-feet over a ten-year period.

With releases as low as 5 million acre-feet out of Powell, downstream deliveries could fall below that “tripwire,” as Colorado River experts call it, and Lower Basin states could sue.

“I believe that the Lower Basin states will probably bring a compact call against the Upper Basin unless there’s some kind of agreement in place that preserves their claims,” Porter said.

Lower Basins states are also “very likely to bring a legal challenge to the” record of decision, Porter said. Reclamation is expected to release its final decision in the coming days to weeks.

If a lawsuit is brought, it could last for 10 to 20 years, Porter said.

Where negotiations stand

Reclamation says it’s “committed to preserving the opportunity to implement potential future consensus agreements” among the seven states within the framework it outlines.

Shawcroft said that having a clear sense of Reclamation’s plans may help negotiations among the seven basin states because it shows how the feds intend to operate the reservoirs.

Others say it may nudge states closer to courts than consensus, though.

“I don’t see that it helps at all, unless pushing states to litigation can somehow be interpreted as a help,” Porter said. “I don’t see that it creates a context to create a higher likelihood for an agreement.”

“Certainly, if I were an Upper Basin state, I would feel very affirmed right now,” Porter added. “The Lower Basin states have the opposite interpretation.”

And if the hydrology stays bad, negotiations may not get any easier.

“A system that’s totally reliant upon seven-state unanimous agreement deals doesn’t work very well,” Kenney said, “when the only thing there is to negotiate is how the pain and suffering is going to be distributed.”

Meanwhile, “tribes are still totally a side story,” in Reclamation’s governance of the river system, Kenney said.

Reclamation has consulted with tribes, but the Colorado River Indian Tribes (CRIT) said in a statement that Reclamation has been sharing documents with states without “co-equal interaction or discourse” with the tribe, despite CRIT holding 23% of Arizona’s Colorado River allocation.

Going forward, Tso said all 30 tribes, the seven states and the federal government should be at the negotiating table together.

This story was produced in partnership with The Water Desk, an independent reporting initiative at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Environmental Journalism.

This article is published through the Colorado River Collaborative, a solutions journalism initiative supported by the Janet Quinney Lawson Institute for Land, Water, and Air at Utah State University. See all of our stories about how Utahns are impacted by the Colorado River at greatsaltlakenews.org/coloradoriver.

Colorado River crisis threatens crops, not Wyoming’s dam plans, experts say

By
Angus M. Thuermer Jr., WyoFile
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The Bureau of Reclamation’s 10-year plan for managing Colorado River flows seeks to preserve enough water behind the Hoover Dam to sustain electricity generation. (Angus M. Thuermer Jr./WyoFile)

This story was originally published by WyoFile on August 18, 2026.

A federal drought plan for the Colorado River and its tributaries in Wyoming shouldn’t stop Wyoming from building a new dam and reservoir in Carbon County, two Western water experts say.

The Bureau of Reclamation plan for the sweeping basin focuses on maintaining enough water in Lake Powell and Lake Mead to generate electricity and prevent degradation of critical infrastructure, professors from Utah and Arizona said last week.

The 10-year framework to manage water storage and releases in the complex seven-state, two-nation system seeks to balance predictability and flexibility in two-year increments. It also acknowledges that the government has little to no authority over water use in headwater states Wyoming, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico, said Sarah Porter, the director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University’s Morrison Institute.

“One way of reading the final environmental impact statement,” Porter said, “is the Bureau’s determination that it doesn’t really have any authority to limit water use in the headwaters.”

Drought will likely cause agricultural stress in Arizona, Nevada and California, threatening the supply of winter vegetables and possibly other crops, she said.

“We probably won’t be eating as many salads,” she said, because Arizona is where winter lettuce is harvested. “It’s all grown in Yuma.”

More important for Wyoming might be that the Bureau of Reclamation’s final environmental impact statement recognizes the independence of headwater, or upper-division, states to essentially use water as they see fit. Efforts to conserve water in the Upper Basin “are not within the scope of this EIS,” the federal document states.

So while farmers downstream may see their traditional supplies cut, Wyoming forges ahead with plans for the 10,000-acre-foot West Fork dam and reservoir in Carbon County where 6,000 acre-feet a year would be poured onto fields for late-season irrigation on ranches.

Energy equation

The Bureau is imposing the plan after the seven states failed to agree on how to share Colorado River flows as drought crimps traditional allotments that were based on too-rosy estimates.

“We have the lowest reservoir storage we’ve ever seen,” said David Rosenberg, a Utah State University professor and water researcher. “We have very low inflows.”

He and Porter spoke in a Zoom webinar hosted by SciLine, a nonprofit that connects reporters with scientists.

The two called the Bureau of Reclamation plan a decision-making framework for distributing water in the three Lower Basin states — initially for two years.

“It doesn’t place the basin on a path to stabilizing the system at all,” Porter said. “It doesn’t resolve conflict at all. It doesn’t achieve the [long-term] things that the basin really needs at this point.”

The Colorado River Basin, shown as upper and lower basins. (Bureau of Reclamation)

But the plan is “a very clear statement,” Rosenberg said, “of how they’re going to protect infrastructure.”

That infrastructure includes the two major dams, associated power plants and canals that would become useless, even degraded, if the water levels in Powell and Mead drop below critical levels. With the plan, Rosenberg said, the Bureau states: “We’re still going to be generating hydropower.”

Powell’s Glen Canyon and Mead’s Hoover dams can generate some $443 million of market-price electricity a year when operating fully, according to calculations from the Bureau of Reclamation and the U.S. Energy Information Administration. To keep those two reservoirs flush, the Bureau will release water from Wyoming’s Flaming Gorge Reservoir and from Colorado’s Blue Mesa Reservoir and New Mexico’s and Colorado’s Navajo Reservoir.

Beyond that, the Bureau’s plan targets the three Lower Basin states for reductions, depending on water in the river system and reservoirs.

Headwater states largely rely on stream and river flows determined by spring runoff. The at-risk region in Wyoming includes the Green River and its tributaries and the Little Snake River in Carbon County.

In contrast, the Lower Basin “gets all of its water, Colorado River water, from the reservoirs,” Porter said. It’s a lot more complicated to curtail Upper Basin use “than simply to not deliver water out of a reservoir,” she said. “And that’s a sore point with the Lower Basin.”

The two professors predicted a fight. “We expect they’ll be challenging this administrative process,” Porter said of the lower division states’ reaction to the Bureau’s EIS.

Compact call coming

There’s more on the horizon too.

“I also expect that within the next year and a half, or maybe two years, there will be what we call a compact call,” Porter said, “a demand from the Lower Basin for water that the Lower Basin contends the Upper Basin is obligated to deliver.

“That challenge will occur in the United States Supreme Court and that could take 10, 20, 30 years.”

Under the 1922 Colorado River Compact and associated agreements, the upper division states can’t diminish the flow from Lake Powell below 7.5 million acre-feet annually, calculated on a 10-year rolling average. That’s half what engineers originally calculated the watershed would produce; half belonging to the headwater states, half to the Lower Basin. That estimate is now considered to have been exuberantly optimistic.

“We really need to figure out a way collectively to be reducing demand in the Colorado River by at least 3 million acre-feet out of the 15 million,” Porter said, “and that probably can’t all fall on the Lower Basin.

“The Lower Basin,” she said, “didn’t agree to be junior to the Upper Basin.”

If Upper Basin states don’t deliver the 7.5 million acre-feet past the Lee Ferry gauging station just below Lake Powell, headwaters curtailment will begin, starting with the most recent, or junior, water-right holders.

Until then, conservation in Wyoming will be voluntary, generally meaning that if an irrigator or other user forgoes their water right, they will need to be paid. In previous trial conservation programs, that has cost $500 an acre foot.

But a compact call by Lower Basin states would lead to curtailment — a mandatory cutting off of Upper Basin water use starting with the most recent, or junior, rights’ holders. Long-established ranches and irrigators hold senior rights while Wyoming municipalities and industries in the Green River Basin are likely among the first to be curtailed.

An aerial view of the site of the proposed West Fork Dam at the head of the Little Snake River Valley in Carbon County. The proposed dam would be 264 feet high, 700 feet long and made out of concrete. (Major King for WyoFile)

Under the “Law of the River,” Wyoming has rights — on paper — to 14% of the Upper Basin’s 7.5 million acre-feet annually. That’s about 1 million acre-feet. But the state engineer estimated in 2010 that Wyoming’s rights amount to 847,000 acre-feet a year, according to the state’s 2010 plan for the basin. Wyoming uses 680,076 acre-feet and has rights to another 166,924, the latest plan states.

That makes the 100,000 or so Wyomingites who rely on or use Green River water relatively water rich compared to the 40 million down-streamers who rely on the river for some or all of their agricultural and municipal needs. In essence, 100,000 Wyomingites have rights to almost 1 million acre-feet while 39.9 million down-streamers divvy up 7.5 million acre-feet.

The implications go beyond the scarcity of your garden-variety salad.

“If there are big reductions in water supplies to those [Lower Basin] areas, there really will be impacts on our food supply nationally, not to mention other impacts,” Porter said.

Recycling water

While the prospect of southwestern metropolises crashing headlong into ugly sewerage problems caused by the crisis would seem to loom, don’t put all your money into wag-bags and porta potties yet. The municipalities are figuring out how to cope.

“Those cities are making massive investments in advanced water purification to treat reclaimed water to potable to reduce reliance on annual deliveries of Colorado River water,” Porter said. “That access to other water supplies or other water management strategies isn’t really available to agricultural water users or, to a great extent, the tribes who are significant rights holders to Colorado River water.

“We may see impacts to cities really smoothed out and not be very disruptive,” she said. “If we do have disruptive impacts, they will probably fall on rural areas and tribal communities in the Lower Basin.”

The Bureau stepped in after the upper and lower division states couldn’t agree on how to collectively trim water use.

“I don’t think the development [and] the release of the final EIS has moved the seven states closer to consensus,” Porter said. “I think, if anything, it has moved them farther away. I don’t see the state saying we will waive what we think are our rights under the Colorado Compact and come up with a new agreement.

“We are in for a lot of legal conflict, and meanwhile, we don’t have good reason to hope that hydrology is going to bail us out,” she said. “So we could have a lot of fighting over less and less water.”

In the drought-stricken West, birds of a feather flock to low reservoirs

By
Annie MacKeigan, The Water Desk
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Great blue herons at Blue Mesa Reservoir along Colorado’s Gunnison River on July 1, 2026. (Mitch Tobin / The Water Desk)

Gerry Morrell wouldn’t necessarily call himself a birder. But even through the sound of cars and semis speeding past on the nearby interstate, he can pick out the call of a kingfisher. Among the frenzy of bird calls at St. Vrain State Park at any given moment, he’s able to isolate and identify just one. 

Tall, lanky great blue herons are anything but a rarity at the park; but Gerry and his wife, Janet Morrell, had only just begun to see them again in the last few weeks when they visited in July. Persistent drought conditions have worsened the West’s ongoing water crisis, and it seems as though the birds can tell. 

Gerry and Janet have noticed it, too. One warm, mid-July morning, water levels in one of the park’s ponds were higher than the couple would have expected. “This one was down, now it’s up,” Gerry said. “I wouldn’t think that because of everybody’s call for water.” 

Colorado Front Range resident Gerry Morrell can recall when St. Vrain State Park was created, and all the birds it brought with it. (Annie MacKeigan/The Water Desk)

The ponds at St. Vrain State Park are filled by groundwater and overflow from the neighboring St. Vrain Creek. Gerry noted a temporary increase to the water level, but birds local to the area have not been so convinced. “I did photograph a peregrine falcon over here,” he said a mile into the morning stroll. “But this year, especially since this lake was kind of dead, I’ve not seen them.”

Globally, birds are an indicator of a healthy ecosystem. In the Western U.S., bird populations are grappling with prolonged drought conditions that threaten the health of reservoirs and streams and the habitat they provide. 

One symptom of a dry year may actually be beneficial to certain bird populations. Low level reservoirs expose nutrient-rich mudflats, which is like a buffet for shorebirds and waterfowl. But, too little water in reservoirs or streams leaves many birds with no respite from the drier than normal conditions. 

Shorebirds and waterfowl are no strangers to St. Vrain State Park—Gerry and Janet can be sure of it. The park is like a sanctuary for all the birds that rely on the nutrients and habitat it provides. The couple has gone out walking and taking photos almost every single morning since Gerry retired 10 years ago. He and Janet work in perfect tandem; she is the spotter and he takes the picture. 

“What’s that over there in the tree, Gerry?” Janet asked, eyes like a hawk. It didn’t look like much besides a white, shapeless blob on a tree branch. It could have been a collection of windblown cotton from the cottonwood trees scattered around the state park. Morrell wasn’t sure if it was anything at all, but he took the picture anyway. 

Double-crested cormorants can be identified by their hooked bill and are characterized by floating low in the water, according to the National Audubon Society. (Annie MacKeigan / The Water Desk) 

“I don’t count on anything,” Gerry said, remembering encounters with snowy owls, wood storks, killdeer, bald eagles, swans, various geese and grebes, double-crested cormorants, great blue herons, and snowy egrets. 

But someone’s been missing this year. They’ve yet to see a night heron. Gerry and Janet both had their presumptions on why this could be. Perhaps it is due to a lack of fish. Maybe it could be the abnormally warm temperatures, or the unusual winter snow drought that has had a multitude of downstream effects. 

But according to Colorado Parks and Wildlife, there is no hard data collected on the relationship between the reservoirs at St. Vrain State Park and the birds that feed there. Because of this, Gerry and Janet are left wondering where the night herons may have gone. 

Low level reservoirs can bring in some birds that frequent mudflats but too little water poses a completely different risk. “When we have healthy reservoirs and healthy water, birds can spread out,” said master birder and volunteer at Denver Audubon, Patti Galli. 

There are different pockets of this behavior, depending on the biodiversity of an area and its proximity to one of the major avian flyways. The eastern plains of Colorado, Wyoming, Montana and parts of New Mexico host different birds and behaviors than the high alpine reservoirs of the Rockies, which themselves are different from the salt lakes of the Great Basin. 

Without healthy reservoirs and streams there is more stress on these birds, especially when they have to seek out other habitats that may already be overcrowded or unproductive. “If everyone is fighting at the waterhole and there is just not enough, someone is going to pay the price,” Galli said. 

According to Galli, having less available water and habitat is a huge risk for birds. While healthy birds can spend time and energy on looking for a secondary habitat, “those who are weak or old just might not be able to do it,” Galli said. 

That threat of less and less water remains. At its worst, a low level reservoir can turn into a barren wasteland of cracked and dried mud, unfit for birds. As reservoirs across the west grapple with a dwindling water supply and a foreboding future, the relationship between birds and reservoirs in the west remains up in the air. 

American white pelicans at Dome Lakes State Wildlife Area, south of Gunnison, Colorado, on June 28, 2026. (Mitch Tobin / The Water Desk)

Antero Reservoir serves as a drinking water supply for Denver Water, located in Park County, Colo. In response to the worsening drought, Antero was closed to the public in May 2026. But it is not just fishermen and boaters that have vanished from the reservoir bed. 

“There are just no birds,” said Jack Bushong, a birder who shares bird sightings and facts on YouTube, Instagram and TikTok. Prior to its draining, Bushong visited Antero Reservoir, explaining that it was one of the most biologically productive habitats for birds in the state of Colorado. “It would not be hard to see 40 to 50 species there in just a few hours,” Bushong said. 

But now, Antero’s cracked surface no longer offers habitat or fuel for the various shorebirds or waterfowl that depended on it.

Bushong expects there to be no waterbirds remaining in the area; all that is left is a low density of species that inhabit the sagebrush steppe around South Park. “Maybe a horned lark flying around, you can see that anywhere,” Bushong said. The reservoir and its shoreline is what attracted the waterbirds, and what made Antero Reservoir so ornithologically important. “When it’s dry, they all leave.” 

Bird populations and behavior fluctuate with environmental changes, dry years like this one can be cause for concern.  It is possible that nearby exposed mudflats can provide a more productive habitat for shorebirds because exposed mudflats have varying degrees of desirability among birds. According to Bushong, shorebirds are drawn to long, flat stretches of mud, rather than steep slopes made of sand. 

A double-crested cormorant grazes the surface of the water at St. Vrain State Park on a warm, July morning. (Annie MacKeigan / The Water Desk) 

The draining of Antero was more than an inconvenience for birds in the area. For Bushong, it was heartbreaking, and continues to be devastating. 

“Antero is pretty unique because it has a lot of breeding birds,” Bushong said. At one point, one of those birds was the snowy plover, said Bushong. The snowy plover is currently listed as a state species of special concern by Colorado Parks and Wildlife. 

Without a suitable habitat for breeding at Antero, breeding birds have to find suitable habitat elsewhere, an arduous task. “There’s only so much habitat that’s going to support so many birds,” Bushong said. Breeding birds may be forced to attempt to breed in more marginal habitats, requiring them to fly longer distances for less productive environments. If they cannot find suitable habitat, they will not breed. 

A similar tune is sung across the West. According to Emma Rosen, a birder and former employee at Mono Lake Committee in California, maintaining healthy habitat for these birds is of critical importance. Needing to seek out a new habitat could mean life or death. 

Mono Lake is particularly important to phalaropes. These shorebirds often fly from California to South America in just three days, Rosen said. These birds count on having enough food at Mono Lake to fuel the rest of their journey. 

Mono Lake currently sits below its target elevation of 6,392 feet above sea level. 6,392 feet is the minimum elevation required to support localized ecological health, including birds. “It still does support a lot of migratory birds at its current level,” Rosen said, despite its failure to reach its target elevation. “And if it weren’t for a lot of people fighting for it, it might have been drained like its neighbor, Owens Lake.” 

For phalaropes and other shorebirds, an environment without sufficient food means searching for food elsewhere. Most shorebird species are attracted to habitats with exposed, but not dry, mudflats and shallow water with sparse vegetation. “Just because the habitat criteria is met does not guarantee that the habitat is productive,” Rosen said. “[It] could actually harm shorebirds by causing them to waste energy in places without adequate food.” 

For bird enthusiasts and water enthusiasts alike, the connection seems clear. Healthy birds mean a healthy environment. Having a vested interest in maintaining healthy reservoirs is critical. But if that alone is not enough, many birders can agree on the next best reason to care about these bird populations. “They’re beautiful and awesome,” Rosen said. “Everyone should care about something that is so awesome.” 

Gerry Morrell spots a great blue heron at St. Vrain State Park on July 17, 2026. (Annie MacKeigan / The Water Desk)

Back at St. Vrain State Park, the bird search continued. As the couple made their way deeper into the park, the sights and sounds of speeding cars dwindled, leaving nothing but the sound of bird calls and footsteps on gravel. 

When Gerry returned home to go through his photos from the morning adventure, a frame from early in the walk caught his eye. He enlarged his photo of the shapeless blob nestled into the tree that Janet had pointed out, and there it was. A black-crowned night heron in all its glory. It would be their first sighting of the stocky bird of the year, atypical of years past.

This story was produced and distributed by The Water Desk at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Environmental Journalism.

Fearing ‘catastrophic impacts’ from water cuts, Nevada sues feds over Colorado River plan

By
Steven Rodas, Inside Climate News
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Hoover Dam and Lake Mead, along the Colorado River, in May 2021. Photo by Alexander Heilner/The Water Desk.

This article originally appeared on August 24, 2026, on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

Three days was all it took for the Trump administration’s Colorado River plan to see a legal challenge from, somewhat ironically, Nevada. 

Of the seven states that rely on the river, Nevada gets the smallest amount by law.

Nevada water managers said the long-term impacts from the proposed cuts could be devastating—with Las Vegas bearing some measure of the pain. 

Under the federal plan, southern Nevada could—in future years—lose over 70 percent of its already-sparse Colorado River allocation while Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming won’t face any mandatory cuts, Nevada officials said Monday. 

The reductions “could have catastrophic impacts on our economy and the way people live here in southern Nevada,” John Entsminger, general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, told Inside Climate News.

Entsminger highlighted that the Colorado River provides 90 percent of the water supply for 76 percent of Nevada’s population.  

“This is a statewide issue in terms of the economic impacts that would be felt if these sorts of arbitrary and draconian cuts were imposed upon us,” Entsminger said.

Given those fears, the state asked the U.S. District Court of Nevada to order the federal Bureau of Reclamation to revoke its plan, according to the 31-page lawsuit. The Trump administration’s plan violates a complicated set of policies, laws, court cases and prior agreements (known as the “Law of the River”), unfairly makes life tougher for three states and does not require four other states to make water restrictions, Nevada officials said.

The Department of the Interior could not immediately be reached for comment Monday.

Brandon Gebhart, Wyoming’s state engineer and lead Colorado River negotiator, said the Cowboy State is concerned by any assertion that the Bureau of Reclamation should consider and impose mandatory conservation measures and reductions in the Upper Basin. 

“We take involuntary, hydrology-driven cuts every single time there is a drought,” Gebhart said in a statement to Inside Climate News. “We will oppose any attempt to use federal administrative guidelines to unnecessarily drain our limited storage or burden Wyoming citizens with additional hydrologic risks.”

The Colorado River supplies water to between 35 and 40 million people across seven Western states, 30 Native tribes as well as two Mexican states. The river is also crucial to about 5 million acres of farmland.  

Last week, the Trump administration released a plan that requires Nevada, Arizona and California to cut water use by roughly 20 percent over the next two years. More substantial cuts would be permitted if needed in the next decade to keep the river’s drought-stricken reservoirs from dipping to dangerously-low levels. 

“This isn’t about political posturing,” Nevada Governor Joe Lombardo, said in a statement after the lawsuit was filed. “This is a matter of survival for a community that represents about two-thirds of our state’s citizens and the lion’s share of its economy.”

The 1922 compact between the Colorado River’s users assumed that about 17.5 million acre-feet of water was available to the river’s upper and lower basins and Mexico. However, the historical average of the river’s natural flow has only been roughly 14.7 million acre-feet. That fell to an average of 11.2 million acre -feet between 2020 and 2024, according to provisional data from the Bureau of Reclamation. 

The Colorado River’s reservoirs have declined amid a historic 26-year drought that researchers say is being exacerbated by climate change. Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the river’s largest reservoirs, have fallen to record lows.

While Nevada has had ongoing talks with California and Arizona on the Colorado River negotiations, Entsminger said Nevada filed the lawsuit on its own. 

Experts said Monday that the other two states may sign on to the suit as well.

An Arizona Department of Water Resources spokesperson said Monday the state was still evaluating Nevada’s complaint and working on next steps. Officials in California said the state was also reviewing the complaint and was unable to comment.

Colorado officials said Monday they are reviewing Nevada’s filing. 

With Monday’s lawsuit, Nevada is challenging the Trump administration ten-year plan they said cuts the state’s annual portion of 300,000 acre-feet of water to as little as 86,500. 

The highly-contentious matter may ultimately reach the Supreme Court.

“It isn’t unexpected that there would be litigation over the new rules from the Department of the Interior for operation of the Colorado River,” Anne Castle, a senior fellow at the Getches-Wilkinson Center at the University of Colorado Law School and a former assistant secretary for Water and Science at the Interior Department, said Monday. 

Castle—noting that Arizona was widely expected to litigate—said it was only somewhat surprising Nevada took “the first shot.” 

Nevada’s complaint requests that even the two-year, short-term plan for the Colorado River be rescinded, but Castle noted operations would need to continue to supply states with water.

The Department of the Interior “has to operate the Colorado River and its infrastructure while any lawsuits are pending, and it’s unlikely that a court would take it on itself to define how the river will be operated,” Castle said.

David Feldman, a professor emeritus in the Department of Urban Planning and Public Policy at the University of California, Irvine, said what complicates matters on the Colorado River further is that self-imposed cuts by states have not been enough over the years. That includes drastic cutbacks from Las Vegas.

“For starters, consider that all seven states have either initiated plans or taken actions to conserve or reduce water uses—especially urban uses, so it is not true that they have taken no measures in light of the multi-year mega-drought,” Feldman said Monday.

However, he said the amount of reductions that will be required to sustain and stabilize the basin’s water supply will require annual cuts in consumption of at least 3 million acre-feet (or 980 billion gallons), and probably 4 million acre-feet, or 1.3 trillion gallons.

Legal challenges like those filed this week are only bound to complicate, and lengthen the timeline for, any negotiations that happen going forward, various experts said.

Does Entsminger—who leads talks for Nevada— hope Monday’s lawsuit forces parties to come to an agreement outside the courts? 

“I do,” Entsminger said. 

“I think the best solution is always giving the seven states and the federal government room to agree upon a solution that maybe nobody loves, but that everybody can live with.”

Wyatt Myskow and Jake Bolster contributed to this report.

How low can the Colorado River go? A slow float on the 15-mile reach

By
Heather Sackett, Aspen Journalism
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A group of paddlers take a lunch break on the 15-mile reach of the Colorado River this week. Boaters had to occasionally drag their duckies and paddle boards through the shallows because of extremely low flows. (Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism)

On a hot and sunny morning in August, a group of nine paddlers pushed their duckies and stand-up paddle boards into the Colorado River at Harky’s boat launch in Palisade. 

The goal of the float was to experience and document the river at one of the lowest levels it has ever seen. With flows hovering around 93 cfs, a bathtub ring showed on the rocks along the riverbank and rusty hunks of old farm equipment emerged from the streambed. Bright green algae grew between the rocks, and herons and ospreys hunted in the shallows. 

In many places, paddlers got hung up on rocks and were forced to drag their watercrafts through the ankle-deep water. It took about four hours to float the roughly six-and-a-half miles from Palisade to Corn Lake, a trip that normally takes two to three hours with higher flows.

Boaters got hung up on rocks in the 15-mile reach of the Colorado River during extremely low flows this week. The stretch of river between Palisade and the confluence of the Gunnison River is chronically dry. (Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism)

The trip was organized by Joel Sholtes, a water resources engineering instructor at Colorado Mesa University and a coordinator for the Grand Valley River Corridor Initiative. 

“I knew that the river would kind of be on life support and maybe even dry up so I wanted to get out on the river with the people that were involved in managing its flow and experience the 15-mile reach at such a historically low level,” Sholtes said. “It just felt important to be on it and see it both from a habitat standpoint and from a user experience standpoint.”

The Colorado River and its water users are now experiencing the consequences of the lowest winter snowpack on record, exceptionally hot temperatures and resulting low streamflows. The impacts are being felt across Colorado as farmers and ranchers have their irrigation water cut, cities and towns impose severe water restrictions on their customers and flows dwindle in stretches of river that are critical habitat for the ecosystem. 

The stretch of the Colorado River between the large agricultural diversions in Palisade and the downstream confluence with the Gunnison River is known as the 15-mile reach. This chronically depleted section is also home to endangered fish. Water managers work each year to keep enough flows for fish by coordinating carefully timed releases from upstream reservoirs.

This year’s historic drought makes keeping enough water in this reach more challenging than usual. The recovery program has pools of water dedicated to the fish in Lake Granby and Ruedi Reservoir that it releases specifically to boost flows in the 15-mile reach, but because of the dry conditions, less of that water is available. According to the Colorado Division of Water Resources, the average August flows in the 15-mile reach have been about 119 cfs this year, far below the 810 cfs target set by the Upper Colorado River Endangered Fish Recovery Program. 

The program’s Instream Flow Coordinator David Graf told water managers on a conference call Wednesday that the program is trying to keep 75 cfs in the river through the end of August. Graf said the program was responsible for about 70% of the water in the river during Tuesday’s float; without it, flows could have dipped to around just 25 cfs.

“We are so far below the recommended flows anywhere in the Colorado River basin right now,” Graf said. “Keeping water in there is valuable; it takes a village.”

Irrigators reduce diversions

Nearly all of the river’s flows are being diverted to the Grand Valley’s agricultural producers. Colorado River water transforms the valley’s desert into a ribbon of verdant peach orchards, vineyards, corn and alfalfa fields. The valley’s irrigation districts can collectively draw 1,950 cfs from the river, but this year, they have reduced that down to 1,450 cfs in an effort to save some water for later in the season. 

“We collectively set the target flow lower for the sole purpose of extending to gain and accrue some storage,” said Jackie Fisher, manager of Orchard Mesa Irrigation District. “We had none at the beginning of the year and it became super critical to talk with our partners and say, what can we live on now because we knew we needed it two or three months later.”


The Grand Valley Irrigation Company canal on the left is the last big agricultural diversion on the Colorado River in the Grand Valley. It marks the beginning of the 15-mile reach.
(Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism)

Late summer is a crucial time for irrigators because the high flows of spring runoff have come and gone, but hot temperatures drive up the amount of water needed by crops. Irrigators often depend on releasing water stored in upstream reservoirs during this time to supplement low river flows. This year, spring runoff peaked weeks early and a pool of water in Green Mountain Reservoir known as the Historic Users Pool did not fill, which created far-reaching impacts.

HUP water is released mainly to satisfy farmers and ranchers in the Grand Valley, which hold the senior, commanding water rights on the river. The HUP also protects other water users, known as HUP beneficiaries, because without the releases from Green Mountain to supplement the Grand Valley, these other users could have to cut back. 

Entities that own or lease stored water, like the Colorado River Water Conservation District, the Colorado Water Trust, Grand County and Northern Water, among others, have pitched in this year to contribute extra acre-feet to Grand Valley irrigators. But even with collaboration and water sharing, Grand Valley Water Users Association General Manager Tina Bergonzini said they cannot guarantee water deliveries to their farmers after September 1. Irrigation season typically goes through Oct. 31. 

“It probably sounds a little melodramatic to say, but it’s not: It’s literally the first time in 111 years that we’ve run out of water in the Grand Valley Water Users Association,” Bergonzini said. “I’ve done my best and my staff has done their best to make sure that our producers and our residents that are under our system are aware that we could get to the point that we have unreliable delivery.”

Joel Sholtes, left, and Abby Burk paddle the 15-mile reach. Sholtes organized the float to experience the river at extremely low flows. (Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism)

GVWUA irrigators have been on restriction all season and the association has been taking just 500 of its 730 cfs water right. Bergonzini said many of her producers have switched to less thirsty crops this year like triticale and Sudangrass, instead of corn and alfalfa, and have made adjustments to the way they irrigate to adapt to less water. 

Heading into the fall with unreliable water is a scary scenario for some, Bergonzini said. It’s the time of year when some farmers plant winter crops and have a need for lots of water.

“We’ve tried to make sure everybody is prepared and that’s really all we can do,” she said. 

As water managers grapple with how to stretch this year’s meager flows as far as possible, Sholtes said from a recreation and quality of life standpoint, the Colorado River still provides so much value to the community – even when it’s barely flowing.

“I think it’s important to know that even in drought conditions, the river is accessible and enjoyable,” he said. “It’s my interest as a citizen in the Grand Valley, and as a scientist, to have a river that works for everyone, and to have growth and use that is compatible with the river ecosystem.”

Aspen Journalism is a nonprofit, investigative news organization covering water, environment, social justice and more. Visit aspenjournalism.org.

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