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How much runoff comes from the West’s snowpack?

By
Mitch Tobin
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Aerial view of Paonia Reservoir on Colorado’s Western Slope on December 24, 2020. Photo by Mitch Tobin, The Water Desk.

Snow is a cornerstone of the American West’s water supply, but just how important is it to the region’s streams, rivers and reservoirs?

In the popular press and academic papers, the sizable share of runoff that originates as snowmelt is often cited as a reason why the West’s snowpack is so crucial to both cities and farms, not to mention the region’s wildlife and very way of life.

But when a team of researchers set out to study the question, they found a wide range of estimates cited in 27 scientific papers. They concluded that “a detailed study of the contribution of snow to the runoff over the western U.S. has not been conducted.”

To clarify the connection between the snowpack and streamflow—and project how climate change is altering the relationship—the scientists used computer simulations and hydrological modeling in a 2017 paper in Geophysical Research Letters to estimate snow’s significance for runoff across the West. Here’s what they found:

  • 53% of total runoff in the West originated as snowmelt, even though only 37% of the precipitation fell as snow.
  • In mountainous parts of the region, snowmelt was responsible for 70% of runoff. Specifically, it was 74% for the Rockies, 73% for the Sierra Nevada and 78% for the Cascades (see graphic below).
  • A quarter of the West’s land area, primarily in the high country, produced 90% of total runoff on average.

Climate change will reduce the snowpack’s contribution to runoff, according to the study, as warmer temperatures make it more likely that precipitation will fall as raindrops, rather than snowflakes, leaving downstream water users vulnerable.

“The snowpack is more efficient at producing runoff and streamflow than liquid precipitation,” said co-author Jennifer Adam, a Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Washington State University. “When it’s cold, you have less evaporative demand.”

Climate change threatens snowpack

A diminished snowpack and less snowmelt in rivers “would likely exacerbate the dry-season water scarcity in the future,” according to the study. “In addition, the earlier snowmelt will strain storage capacity of the hydrologic infrastructure and further reduce the water availability in the prolonged dry season.”

Future runoff in the West will be affected by many other factors, including land-use changes, water policies and water efficiency trends. But the researchers caution that “due to the profound reliance on snow as water resources, future declines in snow accumulations in the West will pose a first-order threat directly on the regional water supply, especially in the late summer and fall” when water demand peaks.

Looking ahead, the study used two climate change scenarios—known as Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 4.5 and 8.5—to project how the snowpack’s contribution to streamflow will respond to warming temperatures and altered precipitation.

As I noted in a previous post, RCP 8.5’s business-as-usual projections for the carbon output of the global economy now appear too pessimistic, so the more moderate emissions scenario in RCP 4.5 may be more plausible.

Using RCP 4.5, the study projects that by 2100, the fraction of runoff coming from the snowpack will decline from 53% to 39.5%. For streams and rivers draining the region’s major mountain ranges, the figure will drop from 71% to 57%.

The declines are even greater when using the higher-emissions RCP 8.5 scenario: snow-derived runoff in the West falls to 30.4%, and in mountainous areas, it’s down to 45%.

In other words, with enough warming and time, the West’s snowpack will no longer be responsible for the majority of runoff in the region. The change in character and timing of runoff will pose serious challenges, not only for humans who have built elaborate water infrastructure based on snowmelt but also for other species that have come to depend on snow-dominant systems.

Snowmelt’s contribution to reservoirs

The 2017 study also examined the snowpack’s importance to each of the region’s largest 21 reservoirs, which collectively have more capacity than the 2,300+ other reservoirs in the West combined.

Overall, snowmelt accounts for 67% of storage in these reservoirs. For the largest three in the West—Mead, Powell, and Fort Peck—the figure is 70%. In the map below, the circles are sized according to each reservoir’s storage capacity and shaded by the percentage derived from snowpack (click on circles for more data).

Reservoirs are collection points for runoff, so to understand why some are more or less dependent on snowmelt, the researchers looked at the watersheds upstream. The map below shows that dependence on snowmelt varies greatly across the vast and topographically diverse region, with the bluest shading representing areas most dependent on snowmelt and the yellow shading showing places least reliant on snow.

Source: Li, D. et al. (2017).

What explains the geographic pattern?

“Winter temperature and then also the fraction of annual precipitation that falls in the winter are the two key pieces,” Adam said.

In some parts of the region, it’s cold enough at high elevations for it to snow and most of the yearly precipitation falls in winter. But at lower elevations and in other parts of the West, there’s more precipitation outside of winter, and even during the colder months rain may fall instead of snow.

Aerial view of the San Juan Mountains snowpack, Electra Lake and the Animas River, north of Durango, Colorado, on May 26, 2024. Photo by Mitch Tobin, The Water Desk, with aerial support from LightHawk.

Warming reshapes river flows

Climate change will not only alter the snowpack’s contribution to runoff but also profoundly change the timing of those streamflows and the fundamental character of many waterways.

Adam noted that another study, published in 2010 in Climatic Change, classified tributaries into three categories—rain-dominant, transient rain-snow, and snowmelt-dominant—based on their precipitation patterns. The graphics below show that each of these regimes lead to very different hydrographs, which are visualizations of streamflow over time that essentially tell the story of a river’s discharge through the seasons.

Graph “a” shows a rain-dominant system, represented by the Chehalis River, east of Aberdeen, Washington and near the Pacific Coast. This hydrograph peaks early in the winter because rainfall quickly runs to the river. Graph “b” shows the transient rain-snow system, in this case represented by the Yakima River in south-central Washington, where the streamflow exhibits two peaks: a smaller one due to winter rains and a much larger one due to the spring snowmelt from higher elevations. Finally, graph “c” shows a snowmelt-dominant system, in this case the Columbia River at The Dalles, Oregon, where the streamflow remains low throughout the winter but then ramps up in spring and peaks in summer due to the high-country snow melting out.

Source: Elsner M., et al. (2010).

These three hydrographs depict very different rivers in terms of the timing and magnitude of their flows. The hydrographs also lead water agencies to pursue varying management strategies to ensure that customers get enough water, while individual species and entire ecosystems have evolved through the ages to cope with the streamflow regimes. In the 21st century, however, warming temperatures will reshape these curves by making these systems more dependent on rain than snow.

“In those places that are snowmelt dominant historically, you’re going to see a lot of vulnerability to warming temperatures,” Adam said, adding that junior water rights holders are most at risk. “More of our modeling is looking at the water rights and trying to understand where the water restriction is going to be felt.”

Ecologists have long warned that reduced streamflows pose a dire threat to cold-water fisheries, such as trout. Adam said a shift from snowmelt to rain could compound the problem. “One of the problems with the loss of snowpack is that snowmelt cools down the system,” she said. “It’s not just about water volume, but it’s also about cooling the rivers.”

Looking ahead, climate models are crystal clear in projecting warmer temperatures, but the story for precipitation is clouded by uncertainty, making it especially hard to predict runoff at lower elevations.

“We don’t really know what’s going to happen to the rain dominant systems: Are they going to get wetter? Are they going to get drier? We just don’t know,” Adam said. “At least we know with confidence that the snowmelt-dominant systems are going to become more and more stressed.”

Aerial view of the Blue River, a popular trout fishery near Silverthorne, Colorado, on December 22, 2019. Photo by Mitch Tobin, The Water Desk.

The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and power of journalism connected to Western water issues. We’re an editorially independent initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Scientists seeking answers about Mars look to the Colorado River’s canyons

By
Rae Solomon, KUNC
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The San Jun River is a major tributary to the Colorado River. Here flowing near Comb Ridge and Mexican Hat. Scientists are looking at the landscape of the arid watershed to learn about the ancient climate of Mars. (Ted Wood/The Water Desk)

New research from the University of Arizona suggests an unlikely connection between the Lower Colorado River Basin and the planet Mars. 

It’s a link that spans 140 million miles through the cold, dark vacuum of outer space and billions of years through the eons, allowing scientists to use similarities between the two landscapes to learn about the ancient Martian climate. 

Maybe it’s the intriguing red color, or because it’s one of the brightest points of light in the night sky, but the planet Mars has always loomed large in the Earthling imagination. We long to know the Red Planet better, while simultaneously fearing what we might find.

“It’s extremely important because it’s the most Earth-like of other planets,” said Scott Hubbard, a retired Stanford University astronautics professor who was the first director of NASA’s Mars Program director from 2000-2001 and went on to lead the Agency’s Ames Research Center for several years. “Humanity has been fascinated by this little red dot in the sky for thousands of years.

That little red dot has preoccupied hydrologist Lin Ji for years. While the University of Arizona researcher and freshly minted PhD is usually more solidly grounded on Earth – most of her research has focused on the Lower Colorado River Basin – a few years ago, she became fascinated by satellite images of the Red Planet. 

The Martian landscape – full of branching, twisting valley networks – was distinctive and stuck in her mind. And that’s why she noticed something interesting looking down at Arizona’s Santa Cruz River from her airplane window. 

“I thought, ‘oh, this Santa Cruz River system looks exactly the same to the Martian Valleys,’” she said. “They both have tree-like, branching river systems.”

That observation sparked a big idea that eventually made its way into her dissertation.

“I realized that there could be a connection between the Earth’s river systems and the Mars valley networks,” she said. “They share similar characteristics. Which indicates that they could have a similar climate.”  

An aerial view of Arizona’s branching Santa Cruz River, a tributary of the Colorado River, in January, 2023. Views like this led hydrologist Lin Ji to look for similarities between the southwest and the landscape on Mars. (Courtesy Lin Ji)

Where’s the Martian water?

For the canyons of the Lower Colorado River Basin, that would be an arid climate. Rain in the region is rare but when it does come, it’s heavy, leading to flash flooding so powerful it can carve entire landscapes. 

If that doesn’t sound anything like the Mars we know and love today, there’s a reason. Despite its fiery color, Mars is a cold planet.

“Mars today has a very thin atmosphere. It’s like Earth at 100,000 feet,” Hubbard said. “It’s mostly carbon dioxide.”

There is no rain, and certainly no flooding rivers, on the Red Planet. As far as scientists currently know, the planet’s surface is mostly devoid of liquid water: all of it is frozen solid at the surface in large polar ice caps.                                 

But the Martian valleys in Lin’s hypothesis were formed several billions of years ago, when the solar system was much younger. Back then, widespread volcanic activity on Mars constantly spewed atmosphere-forming gasses, keeping the planet warm. During Mars’s Noachian and Hesperian Periods, ranging from 3 to 4 billion years ago, liquid water was plentiful. Ji’s research suggests flash flooding was common, just like in the valleys of the Lower Colorado River Basin.

“We inferred that the valley network on Mars was also formed by high intensity rainfall and a very quick flow process,” Ji said. 

To prove her hypothesis that the climate of ancient Mars corresponded to that of the Lower Colorado River Basin, Ji used machine learning, a type of artificial intelligence that learns from complex datasets. She trained her model on a very broad sample of earthly landforms from across the globe, enabling it to correlate certain climate zones with specific qualities of valley geomorphology. Then, she turned the model towards Mars. 

Satellite imagery of the Warrego Valles, a branching valley network on Mars. VIS instrument. Latitude -42.3, Longitude 267.5 East (92.5 West). Released March 26, 2004. Hydrologist Lin Ji thinks the landscape there was formed under similar conditions to the Lower Colorado River Basin. (NASA/JPL/Arizona State University)

“We used machine learning to connect the Earth’s climates and its landforms,” she said. “Then we switched this to Mars. We compared the Martian valleys to those in different climatic regions on Earth to help inform what the climate might have been on early Mars.”

That process found a close match between the Martian landscapes and the arid climate of the Lower Colorado region, which produced notable geologic wonders such as the Grand Canyon. 

Not by flash flooding alone

But river basins aren’t shaped by flash flooding alone. 

While the speed and volume of a valley’s central river is the driving force, there are many overlapping forces that are also important, according to University of Colorado Boulder geologist Lon Abbott: the structures of geologic layers, ice age cycles, plate tectonics and earthquakes, not to mention ecosystem processes – animals interacting with the landscape, and the presence or absence of deep-rooted vegetation.

“It’s a really complex interplay of different factors that have different time scales,” Abbot said. “And the morphology that you see is the combination of all of those.”

He says that complexity makes it hard to compare the two planets in a straightforward way. 

“It’s really tough to get down to the real nitty gritty of what climate regime on Earth matches the climate regime on Mars,” he said. “I’m not sure that we could argue with confidence that 3. 5 billion years ago Mars was more similar to the climate that we see today in the Lower Colorado River Basin.”

Abbott has not read Ji’s dissertation, but he does see the promise of her approach of using sophisticated computer modeling to cut through some of that complexity. 

“Exploring machine learning is allowing you to run through a set of complex feedbacks more efficiently than we’ve been able to do in the past,” he said. “That’s where it can be a real advantage and move our understanding forward beyond what it was before.”

The big question

And if Ji is right about the Martian climate, that information could help resolve one of humanity’s all-time biggest obsessions: is there life on Mars?

“What we would certainly know is: was Mars habitable? Was it an environment that if life emerged, it would be able to live long and prosper?” Hubbard said. “It may be that as Mars cooled and as ice began to form, that some amount of that surface water found its way underneath. And if life formed, it could still be there.”

So, if Mars does still harbor life, it turns out this research connecting the Colorado River to that distant planet just might help scientists anticipate where that life still exists, making it the key to a successful mission, Hubbard said. 

“Understanding how the climate evolved over time would tell us a lot about, if life did form, where it might be today.”

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

In “Water Bodies,” Western writers tap into intimate connections to their local waterways

By
Luke Runyon
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A man dives into a clear mountain lake from a rocky cliff. The lake is ringed with pine trees.
A man dives into a mountain lake on August 2, 2020. (Luke Runyon/The Water Desk)

In the arid West, water verbs are often bureaucratic. Rivers, streams and lakes are allocated, decreed, diverted, divided and used. Droplets are distributed to serve human needs. Scarcity drives the narrative in many of the region’s watersheds, where streams are given jobs—to irrigate crops, water lawns and flow through kitchen faucets. Water is a utility. 

In her new anthology, Albuquerque-based author and journalist Laura Paskus invites readers to dispense with those concepts, and instead rethink their relationship to their favorite creek or pond. “Water Bodies: Love Letters to the Most Abundant Substance on Earth” is out this month from Torrey House Press. 

Mostly featuring writers in the West, the collection includes essays and poems that delve into the personal, intimate connections that local watering holes can provide. It asks readers to think of the mystical and meaningful ways that rivers weave through human lives.

In early 2023, Laura invited me to write an essay for the book. In that message, she said she was looking for “ragged, heartfelt, sexy, raucous, loving, and wild essays and poems about western water.” Who could turn down that kind of invitation? I obliged, and my essay titled “Skinny-Dipping” is a chapter in the book.  

To learn more about the book and the process of pulling it together, I sat down with Laura for an interview.

The following has been edited for length and clarity.

Luke Runyon, The Water Desk: So, there are a lot of books about water in the West out there. What makes this one unique or different from the rest of the pack?

Author Laura Paskus (Photo: Adria Malcolm)

Laura Paskus: As a climate reporter, environment reporter, water reporter, I’m often thinking about and writing about water on these big, landscape-level scales, like a watershed, or an entire portion of a river basin within a state. That’s great, and those stories are really important, but I wanted to create something that reminded us that water is extremely local and extremely personal. 

So I reached out to and started with some of my favorite journalists, like yourself, who write about water in the West in a journalistic way. I reached out to you all saying, “I like the work that you do, and it’s important, but what I really want you to do is tell me a story about water that maybe you wouldn’t talk to anybody about or really want anybody to know.” 

I really feel really lucky that I know personally so many of these writers who I admire, and could ask them to take the time to write these really, really personal essays about the waters that they love.

LR: Tell me about the title, “Water Bodies.”

LP: In the past few years, I’ve become pretty obsessed with this idea or belief that water has her own or their own consciousness and will and desire. As a journalist, I write about water all the time as irrigation water, water rights. Even water for ecosystems—it’s always water for something else. 

I’m a little bit smitten with this idea of connecting with water as her own being. In the essay that I ended up writing for this anthology, I wrote about something that I’ve never talked about before, and that is this weird family story. It’s part of my past that I don’t really like, and I don’t really understand. But the more I thought about it and have thought about it over the decades, it’s a story that is a huge part of who I am. It’s probably why I obsess about water, and why I’m a little bit obsessed with this idea of water as having its own consciousness.

LR: Most of the contributors are based in the West. Do you think that Westerners have a unique relationship to water compared to other parts of the country or other places in the world?

LP: I want to say, yes, that we do. But I know people in every other part of the world would be like, whatever. In the arid West, in particular, I think we do have a unique relationship with water, because we’re always craving it, seeking it, hoping for it, praying for it. 

As the West has been warming, and we’re seeing these bigger and more catastrophic wildfires, and now in New Mexico and certainly lots of other places in the West, I think our relationship with rain is changing. It used to be in summertime you could wholeheartedly pray for and wish for and hope for rains. Now, with the burn scars and the flooding that comes off of those burned soils, rains are also really scary and terrifying and destructive. 

So I think in the arid West, in particular, we do have a really thoughtful relationship with water in ways that maybe other people don’t.

LR: Can you give some examples of the pieces that are in this book? 

LP: Christi Bode, who is a documentary filmmaker in Colorado and does a lot of great work around water and community, wrote a really personal essay about watching the dwindling snowpack every year at the same time that she’s dealing with some really hard health issues and related heart issues. So she really opened up her heart, and I feel like she took a really beautiful risk with what she wrote. 

Regina Lopez-Whiteskunk, who does incredible work around Bears Ears [National Monument] and all sorts of important issues around Colorado and in the Four Corners area, wrote a piece about learning how to carry water as a young woman, and the responsibility that that holds for her. I really love her essay. 

Daniel Rothberg, another Western writer I adore, wrote about his relationship with water in the West. He grew up in Los Angeles, and he lives in Reno and is grappling with his relationship with water and moving water. 

Another friend, Desiree Loggins, she’s an academic, and she wrote an essay about living at Zuni Pueblo and learning the history of the Black Rock Dam there. I just am so in love with everybody that contributed. 

LR: What are you hoping that readers take away from this? 

LP: I hope that everyone who reads it thinks about, “What waters do I love? Do I love the hiss of the water in my sauna at home? Do I love the rain? Do I love my town’s little river?” 

I hope that people think about the waters that they love and why they love them and remember that those are worthy. I feel like there is this idea in our culture these days that it has to be big to be good, or it has to be far away to be special. I love connecting with where we are in really small and beautiful and long-lasting ways.

I know that this is a lot to ask people, but it is my hope that people who buy the book write all over it, that they write in the margins about waters that they love. I hope they flip it upside down and write a haiku on the side of it. I hope that these books get dirty and wet and covered in new words.

Desalination helps meet water shortfalls in parts of the world. Is it a viable solution for Colorado?

By
Shannon Mullane, The Colorado Sun
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The Bureau of Reclamation’s Paradox Valley Unit along the Dolores River, near Bedrock, CO. The unit extracts naturally occurring briny groundwater to keep it from over-salting the Dolores River. (Corey Robinson / Special to The Colorado Sun)

State Sen. Kevin Priola traveled to Israel in 2022 and came away with an idea: If the arid country can produce drinking water by taking the salt out of saltwater, the same technology could potentially help Colorado with its water concerns.

The next year, Priola sponsored a bill directing the state to study desalination.

“Thinking of the Colorado River Basin, the northern states and the southern states are basically all in the same boat when it comes to water,” said Priola, a Democrat from Henderson. “I was trying to get people thinking and talking and looking at desalination as being part of the solution.”

The bill was an attempt to explore all options in response to near-crisis conditions on the Colorado River, the water supply for 40 million people, and future water supply gaps in Colorado. But while some uses of desalination — also called desalinization — are technically feasible, the hurdles are so big, lawmakers and experts have said it isn’t worth the investment for Colorado, even as a study topic. Priola’s bill failed, but people are still talking about the concept.

“There’s an idea that, ‘Hey, this is an easy solution. Why don’t we just do this?’” said Gregor MacGregor, a water law expert at the University of Colorado. “It’s like, well, we don’t ‘just do it’ for many reasons.”

The Colorado River Basin, which includes western Colorado, has been stressed by drought, climate change and overuse for years, resulting in a near crisis in 2021 and 2022.

Colorado is facing future water shortfalls of up to 740,000 acre-feet for cities and industries, and up to 200,000 acre-feet for farms and ranches by 2050, according to the state’s 2023 water plan. One acre-foot roughly equals the annual water used by two to three households.

Colorado is already gearing up water projects focused on conservation, drought planning, efficiency and infrastructure upgrades. Priola wanted to explore desalination as one of the possible solutions. 

Desalination involves sucking saltwater out of the ocean — or another salty source of water — and pushing it through a series of membranes to remove dirt, sand, heavy metals and salt, using a process called reverse osmosis to produce drinkable water.

Some cities in Colorado, like Brighton, already use reverse osmosis to treat water. And a federal plant in Montrose County’s Paradox Valley extracts naturally occurring briny groundwater to keep it from over-salting the Dolores River.

But experts are quick to list the challenges: The price tag is high, the process is energy intensive and the byproduct could be environmentally harmful. 

Sen. Cleave Simpson, a Republican from Alamosa, is one of the lawmakers who voted against the 2023 desalination bill. He said he’d rather spend money to improve efficiency than search for new water supplies — and he’s not alone.

When asked if he’d want to invest in desalination between now and 2050, Simpson simply said, “No.” 

Israel is doing it. Why can’t we?

California communities already have facilities, like the Carlsbad Desalination Plant that provides about 10% of the San Diego region’s water demand. The entire Carlsbad project cost about $1 billion.

Arizona has for decades flirted with the idea of building a desalination plant on the coast of Mexico to draw seawater from the Gulf of California to help augment its water supplies.

Israel gets most — 80%-85% according to some estimates — of its drinking water from desalinated seawater. 

A sign warning of a brine pipeline near the Bureau of Reclamation’s Paradox Valley Unit. Brine —  a mix of water, concentrated salt, heavy metals and more — can occur naturally and is a byproduct of desalination.  (Corey Robinson, Special to The Colorado Sun)

But Israel has different water supply limits or demands from farms and cities. Its population of 10 million — a quarter of the population served by the Colorado River — lives in an arid, Mediterranean climate. 

It is about 28 times smaller than the sprawling Colorado River Basin. It has fewer rivers, lakes, groundwater aquifers and mountains to feed its water systems, which means there’s more political momentum to spend money on expensive options, like desalination, to preserve naturally occurring supplies.

“Look at the landmass and the population of Israel versus the Colorado River Basin. It’s kind of apples to oranges there,” MacGregor said. “We could take that money and invest in on-farm improvements that would probably be a much easier and tried-and-true method.”

But … what about a pipeline to Colorado from the Pacific?

Sen. Kyle Mullica, D-Thornton, who also sponsored the 2023 bill, said his goal was to look at all options to address water stress in Colorado. When it comes to building pipelines to transport desalinated seawater from the Pacific Ocean to the state — it makes a certain amount of sense, he said.

“If we want to talk about pipelines … we’ve had businesses invest in pipelines transporting other materials similar distances, when you think about oil,” Mullica said. “I don’t think it’s out of the question.”

That idea is not a viable source of water for Colorado that the state is considering, said State Engineer Jason Ullmann, Colorado’s top water cop.

Building the plant and the pipeline would be pricey. Then there are energy expenses related to pumping water over 1,000 miles and thousands of feet up in elevation. The total cost would likely be in the tens of billions of dollars, he said in an email.

“Colorado is focused on more feasible solutions to solve our water supply programs,” Ullmann said.

If not seawater, what about groundwater?

If hurdles accessing ocean water are too high, Coloradans might be tempted to consider the water below their feet.

California announced future projects to desalinate brackish groundwater, which is slightly less salty than seawater. The federal government has a research facility in Alamogordo, New Mexico, looking into de-salting groundwater in inland states. Nearby, the city of Alamogordo is planning a $54 million groundwater desalination facility.

Becky Mitchell, Colorado’s top negotiator for Colorado River issues, questioned where the state could put the byproduct, called brine — a mix of water, concentrated salt, heavy metals and more.

“It’s the brine disposal that is part of the piece that we have to address,” Mitchell said.

Commissioner Becky Mitchell, Colorado’s representative in Colorado River Basin negotiations, speaks about water issues during a panel Dec. 14, 2023, at the Colorado River Water Users Association conference in Las Vegas. (Shannon Mullane / The Colorado Sun)

Coastal communities can release it into the ocean, raising concerns about negative impacts on fish populations and coral reefs. Colorado’s options would be more limited, but could include pumping the brine underground or spreading it in ponds to evaporate. 

Both come with baggage. Evaporation ponds raise questions about economic impacts and harm to wildlife. At the Paradox Valley Unit, injecting brine deep underground has been linked to thousands of small earthquakes and a 4.5 magnitude earthquake in 2019.

Then there is the question of whether there is any unclaimed brackish groundwater available in the first place, Simpson said. In his region, Colorado courts have already declared deep, confined groundwater aquifers to be over-appropriated. 

“Unless we change course somehow, tapping more water, deeper — that needed to go through desalination to be used — it’s just not an option,” he said.

Could more facilities around the basin help Colorado?

Water experts and lawmakers want other basin states to invest more in desalination to add to their water supplies in hopes that it could reduce demand for Colorado’s water. 

“We’re talking about a way to have our neighbors to the southwest and west rely more on desalinated water, and Colorado benefiting from having to send marginally less water downstream going forward,” Priola said.

It’s not that simple, water experts said. 

Colorado River Basin states would need dozens of facilities to make a dent in the basin’s multimillion acre-foot supply gap. (The Carlsbad Desalination Plant in California provides up to 56,000 acre-feet of desalinated seawater per year, and it’s the largest in the U.S.)

Even if Lower Basin states — Arizona, California and Nevada — had ample water supplies coming from desalination, they would still have the right to use their full legal allotment of Colorado River water.

And Colorado’s obligations to ensure water flows downstream are founded in century-old water law. More desalination would not change those obligations.

Theoretically, Colorado could pay to build and operate a coastal facility, and the treated water could be piped to a nearby community in California. In exchange, Colorado could keep an equal amount of water.

But the hurdles are sky-high, experts said. Colorado River law requires Colorado to work in tandem with other Upper Basin states to share water and send it downstream. That means New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming would need to OK a new deal.

If the water accounting and legal gymnastics worked out, the politics might not. To even suggest transferring water between the Lower Basin and the Upper Basin would be politically toxic, said Anne Castle, a water expert and federal representative on the Upper Colorado River Commission.

“We have historically been adamantly opposed to transbasin transfers. We don’t want the Lower Basin coming up and buying up water rights in the Upper Basin,” Castle said. “The same would be true for theoretically freed-up supplies in the Lower Basin from desalination. … I don’t see it.”

This story is part of a series on water myths and misconceptions, produced by KUNC, The Colorado Sun, Aspen Journalism, Fresh Water News and The Water Desk at the University of Colorado Boulder. 

Farmers use the majority of Colorado’s water. Shouldn’t they bear the burden of future cutbacks?

By
Jerd Smith, Fresh Water News
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Fields of corn with water irrigation systems on County Road 15 by the Little Thompson River, Saturday, Sept. 7, 2024 in Berthoud. (Tri Duong/ Special to The Colorado Sun)

You’ve heard the news: Farmers and ranchers use roughly 80% of the water in Colorado and much of the American West.

So doesn’t it make sense that if growers and producers could just cut a bit of that, say 10%, we could wipe out all our water shortages? We probably couldn’t water our lawns with wild abandon, but still, wouldn’t that simple move let everyone relax on these high-stress water issues?

Not exactly. To do so would require drying up thousands of acres of productive irrigated lands, causing major disruptions to rural farm economies and the agriculture industry, while wiping out vast swaths of open space and habitat that rely on the industry’s sprawling, intricate irrigation ditches, experts said.

Take a look at the numbers in Colorado. The state produces more than 13.5 million acre-feet of water every year, but only about 40% of that stays here, according to the Colorado Water Plan. The rest flows downhill to satisfy the needs of other states across the country.

Of the 5.34 million acre-feet that is used here at home, 4.84 million is used by ranchers and farmers to grow cows, lamb, pigs, corn, peaches, onions, alfalfa and a rich list of other items that produce the food we eat here in Colorado, the U.S. and internationally.

All told, the agriculture industry is one of the largest in the state, and includes 36,000 farms employing 195,000 people, according to the Colorado Department of Agriculture, and generates $47 billion annually in economic activity.

But here is the hard part. Thanks to crumbling infrastructure, chronic drought and climate-driven reductions in stream flows, the industry is already facing annual water shortages of hundreds of thousands of acre-feet. That number could soar as stream flows continue to shrink and populations continue to grow, according to the water plan.

An acre-foot equals enough water to serve two to four urban households, or a half acre of corn.

“Already, statewide there are irrigated crop producers who don’t receive water in some years,” said Daniel Mooney, a Colorado State University agricultural economist.

“If we had to cut another 10%, those people who are already at the margins would be impacted. I would say we can’t afford to do that.”

From the view of Highway 52 heading East towards Highway 287, center pivot irrigation systems on a farm of sugar beets, Saturday, Sept. 7, 2024 in Longmont. (Tri Duong/ Special to The Colorado Sun)

Out in the fields, just as cities are trying to cut water use inside and out, ranchers and growers are trying to cut back as well because they don’t have as much as they once did.

That too is challenging, according to Greg Peterson, executive director of the Colorado Agricultural Water Alliance.

Peterson spends most of his days working with farmers and ranchers, helping them find money to experiment with new crops and new tilling techniques that help keep water in the soil.

Despite years of work, the transition from farming and ranching in water rich Colorado, to water short Colorado is still evolving.

Peterson cites one crop experiment, where a new type of grass, or forage, was grown to replace alfalfa, a water guzzler.

Twenty farmers in the pilot program switched crops, saving an acre-foot of water per acre of land. Initially, they got $200 a ton for the new grass crop. Today, that same crop is selling for $90 a ton.

“We flooded the market,” Peterson said. “So now we need to look at hiring a marketer to find new markets. Changing what they grow might be the easiest thing to do.”

Finding funding to create new lines of production and new markets is also needed, Peterson said.

In the quest to help farmers stretch existing water supplies, the state and the federal government have spent millions of dollars helping pay for lining irrigation ditches and piping water underground, among other things. But that doesn’t create new water.

The only way to do that, really, agriculture experts say, is to dry up farm and ranch lands, a practice that has caused deep pain and economic suffering in rural communities across the state, particularly on the Front Range where cities continue to buy up large parcels of irrigated land in order to take the water for their own uses.

Colorado has lost roughly 32% of irrigated lands since 1997, according to the National Agricultural Statistics Service. New state policies designed to make it easier and more lucrative to share water between agricultural producers and cities through long-term, temporary leases, rather than having the water permanently removed, have done little to slow the loss of irrigated agriculture, according to Jim Yahn, manager of the North Sterling Irrigation Company in the northeastern corner of the state.

Such deals often require a trip to Colorado’s special water courts, where the legal right to use the water must be changed from agricultural to industrial or municipal use.

“We can recoup money from leasing,” Yahn said. “But it’s whether you want to take the step. It’s scary because when you go into water court, you never know how a judge might rule.”

Yahn was referring to the amount of water associated with water rights. If growers haven’t tracked their water use annually and lack adequate records, a judge could determine that there is less water associated with that water right than originally believed.

Near the Little Thompson River, from County Road 15 heading North, irrigation canals for corn fields, Saturday, Sept. 7, 2024 in Berthoud. (Tri Duong/ Special to The Colorado Sun)

Perry Cabot, a Grand Junction-based agricultural research scientist, has been studying farm water use for decades, testing new ways to help growers stretch water supplies and examining leasing programs that pay growers well and slake the thirst of city dwellers and industry.

Leasing water almost always means drying up land, even if only on a temporary basis. Alfalfa, Cabot said, is one of the few crops that tolerates fallowing well, but it has to be done carefully.

“It is not unrealistic to expect a 10% reduction in use (in a growing season). But that means less hay,” he said.

But then what do cows eat in the winter, Cabot asked. “They are not going to go to Florida. So then do you sell them and buy them back next year (when you have the water to grow hay again). No.”

Agriculture experts say the simplest and most destructive way to cut agricultural water use enough to make up for looming shortages would be to continue drying up large swaths of farm and ranch lands that are already struggling.

“Is it possible? Yes,” irrigator Jim Yahn said. “But is that more important than growing food and supporting local economies? And it’s not just food. What about the open spaces and habitat that our irrigation systems create?”

Sept. 20, at a Grand Junction water conference sponsored by the Colorado River District, Bob Sakata was handing out T-shirts that say, “Without the farmer you would be hungry, naked and sober.” Sakata is agricultural water policy adviser to the Colorado Department of Agriculture. 

He’s been thinking about ways to keep farmers whole even as water supplies shrink, including paying farmers for the benefits their open spaces and lush habitats provide all Coloradans.

And he warned against taking the cost of agricultural water cuts lightly. “We’ve lost 1 million irrigated acres in this state,” he said. “That is scary.” 

This story is part of a series on water myths and misconceptions, produced by KUNC, The Colorado Sun, Aspen Journalism, Fresh Water News and The Water Desk at the University of Colorado Boulder. 

Colorado’s water users are told “use it or lose it.” But is the threat real?

By
Heather Sackett, Aspen Journalism
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The view from the Shane Gulch property, owned by Summit County, where the Blue River begins forming Green Mountain Reservoir. The county bought the property and water rights from the Culbreath Ditch in 2020. (Courtesy of Summit County Open Space and Trails)

In December 2020, the Summit County Open Space and Trails Department bought a 15-acre property with a small pond, three ditches and a well. 

Known as the Shane Gulch property, it was the only remaining private property north of Heeney Road between Green Mountain Reservoir and the Williams Fork Range. The land, just east of Highway 9 and the Blue River, has stunning views of the snow-capped peaks that form the Continental Divide. Summit County purchased the property, which consists of three parcels of rolling hills and meadows, to preserve the unique scenic, wildlife and agricultural heritage values of the area.

The water on the property had historically been used for irrigation. But according to the state Division of Water Resources, the former owners of the property had not used the water rights on one of those ditches, the Culbreath Ditch, in the previous 10 years. The water rights were placed on the initial 2020 abandonment list, leaving them at risk of being lost. 

Abandonment is the official term for one of Colorado’s best-known water adages: Use it or lose it. As the saying goes, a user must do something of value with their water (use it) or the state could take it away (lose it). Once abandoned, the right to use the water is canceled and goes back to the stream where someone else can claim it and put it to use. 

Every 10 years, officials from the Colorado Division of Water Resources review every water right — through diversion records submitted by water users and site visits — to see whether it has been used at some point in the previous decade. If it has been dormant, it’s added to the preliminary abandonment list. But there’s a safety net. Not using the water is just one part of abandonment; a water user must also intend to abandon it. 

The goal of abandonment is to preserve the water law system that the West relies upon. That legal framework, known as prior appropriation, is the bedrock of Colorado water law in which the oldest rights get first use of the river. If an upstream user with a senior water right resumes using it again after decades of letting it sit dormant, that’s not fair to downstream junior water users because it leaves less water for them. The abandonment process prevents people from locking up a resource they aren’t using.

Abandonment-process protections

Although the concept of abandonment may loom large in the minds of water users, only a tiny percentage of water rights ends up on the abandonment list every 10 years, and it’s rare for the state to formally abandon a water right. 

In the last round of cancellations, in 2021, 3,439 water rights ended up on the final abandonment list out of 171,578 total water rights in the state, or 2%. On the Western Slope, 658 water rights out of about 75,000, or less than 1%, ended up on the final revised abandonment list.

Summit County bought the 15-acres of the Shane Gulch property in 2020. According to the Colorado Division of Water Resources, the water rights from a ditch on the property had not been used in more than 10 years and were placed on the abandonment list. (Courtesy of Summit County Open Space and Trails)

Water users have two opportunities to fight an abandonment listing, and state policies have given an extra layer of protection from abandonment to the oldest water rights for the past 20 years. In most, if not all, cases, the water rights that were abandoned truly were not used in the previous decade. 

In an example near Glenwood Springs, a ditch had been filled in and turned into a trail, and the land it had once irrigated was now home to a hotel and recreation center. And those who aren’t using their water because they are participating in state-approved conservation programs, such as the System Conservation Program currently happening in the Colorado River’s Upper Basin (Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming), are protected from abandonment.

“It’s a lot harder than people think to actually abandon water rights,” said Jason Ullmann, the top water engineer at the Colorado Division of Water Resources. “I think people feel like there’s this constant potential for their water right to be abandoned, but because it’s a personal property right to use the public’s resource, you don’t want it to be easy to come in and abandon that right.”

If water users find themselves on the abandonment list, they have a year to file an objection with DWR, and many argue that they did not intend to abandon their water right. DWR staff may then remove them from the list. Ullmann said the majority of those who object are taken off the list. The final list is issued 18 months after the initial one, and water users have another six months to file a protest with the Colorado water court system. 

The Rockford Ditch near Carbondale has one of the oldest water rights on the Crystal River. For the past two abandonment cycles, water rights that date to before the 1922 Colorado River Compact have had extra protection from abandonment. (Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism)

For the past two abandonment cycles, Colorado has made it even tougher to get a water right abandoned by narrowing the pool of which ones are eligible. State officials have decided to leave off water rights that predate the 1929 Boulder Canyon Project Act due to ongoing legal uncertainty about how possible cutbacks would play out across the river’s Upper Basin states. 

 “The more water rights that Colorado abandons against itself, the less water we have to protect for our share of the Colorado River Compact,” said Scott Miller, a Basalt attorney who has represented clients objecting to their abandonment listing. “I’m definitely in favor of protecting pre-compact water rights at all costs because we just never know how that’s going to shake out if there’s a compact call.”

Misconceptions abound

But the simple adage “Use it or lose it” can be misunderstood. Some water users might take more than they need from rivers in a misguided effort to protect their water right. The true value of a water right is tied to its historical consumptive use, which is how much water the crops draw up through their roots. Simply running water through a ditch does not count as use.

However, there is an entrenched incorrect belief that by maximizing the amount of water taken from a stream, one can increase the future value of a water right or protect it from abandonment. Some water users interpret the “use it or lose it” doctrine as “divert it or lose it,” meaning they take as much from the stream as their water right allows whenever possible, leading to real-world effects drawn from a layperson’s legal interpretation. 

Cary Denison is a water right holder in the Gunnison River basin and a former project manager for environmental group Trout Unlimited. He said that in his experience, some users avoid efforts to make farms more efficient because of this misunderstanding. 

Farmers, he said, weren’t taking just the water needed to farm — they were maximizing the amount they could legally take under their water right in an effort to preserve it. “There’s this perceived incentive to divert more water than is actually needed,” he said.

Some irrigators may avoid efforts to be more efficient, like using sprinklers instead of flood irrigation because they think if they don’t use their full water right as much as possible, they will lose it. The true value of a water right is measured by how much of that water the crop uses. (Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism)

Water managers have long recognized this as a widespread misunderstanding that leads to excess water taken from streams. In 2016, Colorado State University released a special report on this long-standing trend. Two of the paper’s authors were Dick Wolfe and Kevin Rein, who each served as Colorado’s state engineer, the state’s top water cop and the position now held by Ullmann. 

Water users are told to divert their whole amount “in order to preserve the water right; that is, protect it from abandonment,” the report reads. “This conclusion is based on a misapplication of the law.” 

Wolfe said these misperceptions have gotten better since the time the report was written. But Denison said they still persist.

“There’s still an incentive in some people’s minds to continue those diversions regardless of crop demand because there’s a fear that their water rights will be examined and somehow they will end up on the abandonment list,” Denison said.

Miller, who mainly represents water users, concurred that this perceived incentive is based on a misunderstanding.

“There’s a misperception that you can sell your diversion rate when the reality is, the only thing you can sell or transfer or change is your consumptive-use portion of the water,” he said.

Overdiverting has real consequences for the ecological health of streams, which are stressed from decades of drought and warming fueled by climate change. Much of the diverted water percolates back to the river eventually, Dension said. 

The problem with these return flows is that they do not go back into the river at the same spot where they are taken out and have a delayed return, contributing to seasonal dry-ups. And after seeping through the soil, return flows can be warm with lower dissolved oxygen, as well as laden with salt and other contaminants, impacting the river’s overall quality and the fish that depend on cold, clean water.

“In some cases, it just results in dry, dry, dry systems,” Denison said. 

In the case of the Culbreath Ditch, Summit County officials found out just how hard it is to abandon a dormant water right. 

After finding themselves on the abandonment list, they filed an objection to the abandonment listing, saying the previous owners, who were elderly, were physically unable to use their water right and did not intend to abandon it. They argued that the water right should be removed from the abandonment list until Summit County, as the new owners of the property, had a chance to assess and use the water right. 

State officials with the department of water resources agreed and removed the Culbreath Ditch from the abandonment list. The county now has six years left to use it before they lose it.

This story is part of a series on water myths and misconceptions that is produced by KUNC, The Colorado Sun, Aspen Journalism, Fresh Water News and The Water Desk at the University of Colorado Boulder. 

Why don’t we just fix the Colorado River crisis by piping in water from the East?

By
Alex Hager, KUNC
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A complex system of pipes, tunnels and canals carries water around the Western U.S., like this one in Colorado’s Fraser Valley. However, policy experts say a cross-country pipeline wouldn’t make sense for political, financial and engineering reasons. (Ted Wood / The Water Desk)

The Colorado River is a lifeline for about 40 million people across the Southwest. It supplies major cities like Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Denver and a multibillion-dollar agriculture industry that puts food on tables across the nation. But it doesn’t have enough water to meet current demands.

Policymakers are struggling to rein in demand on the river, which has been shrinking at the hands of climate change. The region needs to fix that gap between supply and demand, and there’s no obvious way to do it quickly.

But one tantalizingly simple solution keeps coming up. The West doesn’t have enough water, but the East has it in abundance. So, why don’t we just fix the Colorado River crisis by piping in water from the East?

The answer is complicated, but experts say it boils down to this: It doesn’t make sense to build a giant East-to-West water pipeline anytime soon for three reasons — politics, engineering, and money.

Political headwinds

If the West’s leaders wanted to take some water from the East, who would they even ask? Right now, there’s no national water agency that could oversee that kind of deal.

“I would argue that there aren’t many entities with the authority across the country to do this,” said Beaux Jones, president and CEO of The Water Institute in New Orleans. “I don’t know that the regulatory framework currently exists.”

Delegates from states that use the Colorado River meet in Las Vegas on December 15, 2022. Western water is managed through a fragile web of agreements between cities, states, farm districts, Native tribes and the federal government. A similarly complex system applies to many watersheds in the East. (Alex Hager / KUNC)

Water is often managed using a messy patchwork of different government agencies and laws. The Colorado River is managed through a fragile web of agreements between cities, states, farm districts, native tribes and the federal government. Even though they’re all pulling from the same water supply, there’s no central Colorado River government agency.

A similarly complex system applies to many watersheds in the East. Even if a single city or state in the Western U.S. seriously wanted to build a pipeline from the East, it’s not even clear who they’d meet with to ask for water from a different area. And there’s no single federal agency that could sign off on such a deal and make sure it doesn’t harm people or the environment.

Any serious effort to pull new water in from the East to the Southwest would likely touch some part of the Mississippi River basin. It’s a sprawling network of smaller rivers that covers 31 different states, from Montana to Pennsylvania.

It’s a busy river with a lot of uses. And while its shortages aren’t as severe as dry times in the West, the Mississippi River basin goes through its own droughts. So even if, someday, the governments of the East and West set up a formal way to negotiate a water transfer, the cities, farms, boaters and wildlife advocates to the east might not be willing to share.

“The very nature of there being sufficient availability of water in the Mississippi River Basin to, in a large scale way, export that water,” Jones said. “I think there are many people on the ground within the Mississippi River basin that would fundamentally disagree with that.”

Engineering limits

There are countless examples of large pipelines and canals moving liquids around the U.S. at this very moment. The longest existing today is the Colonial Pipeline, which carries gasoline from Houston to northern New Jersey through 5,500 miles of pipe.

So if we have the engineering capacity to do that, could we build similar infrastructure for water? In theory, yes. But it would have to be much larger than existing pipes for oil and gas.

“It takes so much more water to supply a city than it takes gasoline,” said John Fleck, a water policy professor at the University of New Mexico. “So the size of the pipe or the canal has to be a lot bigger, has to be much wider, has to cover a lot more ground.”

Because that pipeline or canal would be so big, it is more likely to ruffle some feathers along the way. Fleck suggested that landowners in its path, including local governments, could push back on a giant new piece of infrastructure running through their properties and mire any pipeline project in regulatory red tape.

Phoenix, Los Angeles, Denver and Salt Lake City wouldn’t look like they do today without giant water-moving systems, like this pipe that is part of the Central Arizona Project. Experts say all of the feasible water pipelines have already been built, and a system to carry water in from the East is too difficult to be worth building. (Courtesy Central Arizona Project)

All that said, a pipeline is still physically possible. There is perhaps no better argument for an East-West water transfer than the fact that the Western U.S. is already crisscrossed by multiple huge pipes and canals that carry water across long distances.

The West as we know it today wouldn’t exist without that kind of infrastructure. Much of Colorado’s population only has water due to a series of underground tunnels that bring water across the Rocky Mountains. Phoenix and Tucson have been able to welcome new residents in the middle of the desert with the help of a 336-mile canal that carries water from the Colorado River. Los Angeles, Albuquerque and Salt Lake City would not be the cities they are today without similarly ambitious water delivery systems built decades ago.

The existence of those water-moving projects isn’t proof that we should build a new, even bigger water pipeline from the East, Fleck said. In fact, he pointed to those systems as proof that we shouldn’t.

“All the feasible ones have largely been done, and the ones that are left are the ones that weren’t done because they just turned out not to be feasible,” he said.

Money problems

Even in a world where the West’s leaders could find a willing water seller, get the right permits and put shovels in dirt, experts say an East-to-West water pipeline would simply be too expensive.

Any solution to the Colorado River crisis will require massive amounts of public spending. The federal government alone has thrown billions of dollars at the problem in just the past few years. But water economists and other policy experts say a cross-country pipeline isn’t the most efficient use of taxpayer dollars.

Kathleen Ferris, former director of the Arizona Department of Water resources, pointed to two ongoing efforts that might be a more cost-effective way to help correct the region’s supply-demand imbalance. One involves paying farmers to pause growing on their fields, freeing up water to bolster the region’s beleaguered reservoirs. Another uses expensive, high-tech filtration systems to turn wastewater directly back into drinking water.

Stacks of hay bales sit beside an irrigation canal in California’s Imperial Valley on June 20, 2023. Experts say there are more cost-effective ways to fix the Colorado River crisis than building a cross-country canal, like paying farmers to pause growing thirsty crops such as alfalfa. (Alex Hager / KUNC)

“Sometimes I feel like people don’t want to do the heavy lifting,” said Ferris, who is now a water policy researcher at Arizona State University. “Instead, they want to just find the next water supply and be done with it and have somebody else pay for it.”

Ultimately, she said, those kinds of programs already have momentum and cost less money than an East-to-West water pipeline.

“Why don’t we do the things that we know are possible and that are within our jurisdiction first,” Ferris said, “Before we go looking for some kind of a grand proposal that we don’t have any reason to believe at the moment could succeed.”

Pipe dreams becoming reality

Piping in water from outside of the Colorado River basin, for all of its challenges, is a tempting enough idea that the federal government has given it a serious look.

In 2012, a Bureau of Reclamation report analyzed ways to bring new water into the Colorado River Basin, including importing piped water from adjacent states.

The study concluded that strategy was not worth the money and effort.

This map from the Bureau of Reclamation’s 2012 “Colorado River Basin Water Supply and Demand Study” shows places where water could theoretically be imported. One of the report’s authors said now “isn’t the time” to pipe water in from the East. (Courtesy U.S. Bureau of Reclamation)

“It just isn’t the time yet,” said Terry Fulp, a retired Reclamation official who helped write the study. “We felt that there were other things we could be doing in the basin, particularly in the Lower Basin, that would relieve the pressure.”

Fulp said the study was a worthwhile endeavor, and that the idea of importing water from the East might make sense down the road. The scale of the challenge posed by the Colorado River crisis, he said, will take some big thinking, “on the order of the thinking when we built the Hoover Dam.”

“It’s one of those possible solutions that should always stay, if not forefront on the table, somewhere on the table, so that you don’t lose sight of it,” Fulp said.

Despite the fact that many Colorado River experts have cast doubt on the feasibility of a cross-country water pipeline, even some sitting state officials say it deserves more research. Chuck Podolak, director of the Water Infrastructure Finance Authority of Arizona said the idea deserves “serious attention.”

“We understand that every option is hard, every option is expensive, every option has political hurdles, every option is a daunting engineering task,” he said. “Right now, we’re in a let’s-look-at-everything mode with eyes wide open.”

Arizona and other states around the region, with their eyes on continued growth, are already looking at ways to stretch out the water they already have using technology. Terry Fulp said those efforts may need to expand past the spendy and ambitious engineering projects that are already helping facilitate that growth.

“It’ll be the time someday, if we want the Southwest to continue to grow the way it’s been growing,” he said. “There’s only so much water in the basin.”

This story is part of a series on water myths and misconceptions in the West, produced by KUNC, The Colorado Sun, Aspen Journalism, Fresh Water News and The Water Desk at the University of Colorado Boulder. KUNC’s coverage of the Colorado River is supported by the Walton Family Foundation.

Cities in the West are booming in population. Will they need a lot more water?

By
Luke Runyon
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Homes line the foothills outside Colorado Springs on Sept. 11, 2024. The city has doubled down on water conservation to make its recent spike in population growth possible. (Luke Runyon/The Water Desk)

When researcher Brian Richter set out to take a close look at how big cities in the Western U.S. were adapting to water scarcity, he already knew the story’s basic contours. 

Previous studies showed the trend clearly for some large utilities. As a megadrought has baked the Southwest since 2000, the region’s biggest cities have reined in their use to keep pace with the declining supply. 

But it had been years since someone took a more region-wide look at who was conserving and how much. Richter, a lecturer at the University of Virginia, and president of his own independent research firm, Sustainable Waters, was up to the task.

After gathering data for 28 large and medium-size water utilities dependent on the Colorado River, Richter and his team were able to see the more modern trend lines in sharp detail. The results surprised him. It wasn’t just that cities like Denver, Los Angeles, Tucson and Las Vegas were using less. They were doing it while growing rapidly. 

His 2023 study found that collectively the region’s cities had grown by 25% from 2000 to 2020, while their water use dropped by 18%. Per person use rates declined even more sharply, falling by 30%. 

“We thought that was nothing short of miraculous, to be honest,” Richter said. “It’s quite a water conservation success story.”

Richter had heard the region’s growth anxieties before. As homes spring up, highways widen and new schools open, conversations about rising populations in the arid West eventually find their way to water. Those new residents mean more green lawns and household faucets, forcing cities to scramble to meet the new demand, or so the thinking goes.

It’s easy to understand why the notion that more people beget more water use jumps to people’s minds, Richter said. All of the on-the-ground impacts of growth are highly visible.

“What you can’t see so easily are the numbers, the water numbers behind that growth,” Richter said. “We felt it was really important to start getting those numbers out there, and to start revealing the fact that it’s not necessarily true any longer, that as a city’s population grows its water use has to increase at the same time.”

Now, as pressure from climate change mounts, the region faces a critical question: Can urban areas keep pace with their past successes in water conservation, or is there a floor to just how much water savings can be wrung from Southwestern cities?

The Colorado Springs skyline rises above Fountain Creek on Sept. 11, 2024. For the past couple decades the city has experienced rapid population growth while ratcheting down its demand for water. (Luke Runyon/The Water Desk)

Using less in Colorado Springs

Until 2002, Colorado Springs was using water like there’s no tomorrow. As the city grew, so did its water demand, hand-in-hand. 

“There was a lot of inefficiency out there, a lot of inefficient fixtures, a lot of landscape irrigation, primarily of turf grass,” said Scott Winter, Colorado Springs Utilities water conservation project manager. “A lot of it was, frankly, egregious.” 

A punishing drought in 2002 provided a shock to the system. While reservoirs declined, the people in charge of Colorado Springs started to realize that unchecked water use would eventually lead to serious shortages. Mandatory restrictions on use at the city level ran from 2002 to 2005.

“I don’t think people thought of the water system, the water supply, as being constrained in any way until we hit 2002 and then our perspective changed on the scarcity of water and how reliable our supply was,” Winter said.

Conservation is now seen as a reliable way to live within their means, he said. 

Scott Winter, Colorado Springs Utilities water conservation project manager, points out a turf grass conversion project on Sept. 11, 2024. The utility offers incentives to encourage homeowners and commercial businesses to swap lawns for native grasses. (Luke Runyon/The Water Desk)

Colorado Springs has taken a gradual approach. First came the rate changes. Residents who irrigated more paid more per gallon. Then came the incentives to swap out indoor plumbing fixtures, such as replacing a toilet that uses 5 gallons per flush with a new model that uses less than 1. 

The city has also begun to embrace the loss of its lawns. It ramped up its lawn replacement program, in which thirsty yards are replaced with native grasses, like blue grama or buffalo grass, which use 60%-80% less water. The utility offers 50 cents per square foot of lawn converted. 

Since Colorado Springs started those conversions in 2013, the city has swapped in native grass on about 3.1 million square feet, or about 72 acres, mostly on commercial properties like shopping centers, churches and business parks. In 2020 a permanent shift to only allow for three days per week of outside watering on existing grass went into effect as well.

Blue grama grows alongside a Colorado Springs parkway on Sept. 11, 2024. Concerns over dwindling water supplies have sped up the city’s conversions of turf grass to blue grama and other native species. (Luke Runyon/The Water Desk)

All of the focus on conservation is paying off, Winter said. From 2000 to 2023, Colorado Springs has grown by about 40%, while also recording a 39% reduction in average per capita water use and about a 25% drop in total water deliveries. The city’s water use is now about equal to what it was in the late 1980s, despite the rapid growth, he said.

Mandatory conservation measures have started taking hold in some parts of the Colorado River Basin, like a nonfunctional turf ban in Las Vegas, for example. But Winter said the cultural and political contours of Colorado Springs mean water managers have to get creative, relying more on voluntary incentives than strict mandates that could rile its conservative voter base.

When the city decided to overhaul its building code a few years ago, the process brought up the usual tensions over growth. One code change ruffled feathers. A restriction on new developments limited turf to 25% of the total landscape. 

“Individual freedom is a core value here,” said Nancy Henjum, a Colorado Springs city council member. Henjum summarized the early complaints of some fellow council members: “What do you mean I wouldn’t be able to have Kentucky bluegrass in my whole yard?” 

But after lengthy discussions, plus field trips to the infrastructure that brings Colorado River basin water over the mountains to Colorado Springs, lightbulbs went off for the city council members about the scarce nature of their supply, she said. As of June 2023, the turf restriction is now officially part of the city’s landscape code.

“It was ultimately fascinating to watch people who are policymakers kind of push back initially, and then little by little over time recognize this is the right thing to do,” Henjum said. 

A sign indicates where to find low water use plants in Colorado Springs Utilities demonstration garden on Sept. 11, 2024. A punishing drought in 2002 reframed the way the community saw its reliance on the shrinking Colorado River. (Luke Runyon/The Water Desk)

Conserving the way out

While city leaders are proud of the water conservation success they’ve had over the past two decades, they say that was the easy part. In Colorado Springs, another 40% reduction in use over the next few decades will be tough, if not impossible, Winter said. 

“Used to be that we could put a conservation program out there and anyone could participate. Almost everyone was inefficient, and so you could just broadcast a program out there and it worked,” he said. “It’s getting harder, it’s getting more expensive. We’re having to get a lot more strategic and targeted in our approach.”

The same is true just to the north, in Aurora. The city grew by 40% from 2000 to 2020, while lowering both its total water use and per-person use, according to Richter’s study. 

“We are the first city (in Colorado) to pass a turf ban,” said Alex Davis, assistant general manager for Aurora Water. “Fifty percent of our use is outdoor water use in the summer, and we’re trying to ratchet that down.”

A path winds through the Colorado Springs Utilities demonstration garden on Sept. 11, 2024. Because of gradual water conservation measures the city has been able to add thousands of new residents while using less water from the Colorado River basin.  (Luke Runyon/The Water Desk)

But Davis isn’t convinced a city like Aurora, with its steep population curve, can rely solely on conservation to make its way toward a stable water future. 

“When we look at our demand projections going forward, we have a gap that we need to fill, right?” she said. “We have a projected need that we can’t meet today for what we expect the population to be in 2060, and so we have to acquire more water resources and do more supply projects in order to meet that gap.”

A big portion of that gap is being driven by climate change, Davis said. Longer, hotter dry spells mean the uncertainty about future water supplies is greater than it was 20 years ago. Her team uses models to game out what kinds of policies the city might need to make it through extreme droughts. 

Under those severe scenarios, Aurora’s plans indicate it would first cut down on outdoor watering, then eliminate it all together. That would leave just indoor, household use, but Davis said, “there are projections where we don’t have enough water to meet household use only in these very severe projected scenarios.”

John Fleck, a University of New Mexico water policy professor, said this is the challenging future facing many of the West’s municipal water leaders. Even so, he cautioned against too much hand-wringing over population growth and urban water use. There’s still a lot of slack in the system and a lot more savings to be had, he said.

Because so much water is used outdoors, Western cities face a fundamental question: As the region warms and dries, how much green space are they willing to part with to close the gap between supply and demand? It’ll be a tough call, but not an impossible one, Fleck said.

“When you think deeply about it, it would be weird for people, for communities, not to take the necessary steps to ensure their future existence, right?” he said. 

“If you’re facing the choice of getting rid of some swimming pools and lawns, or abandoning your city, it’s a no-brainer. People are going to use less water. And that’s what we see happen over and over again.”

This story is part of a series on water myths and misconceptions, produced by KUNC, The Colorado Sun, Aspen Journalism, Fresh Water News and The Water Desk at the University of Colorado Boulder. 

Budget-strapped Wyoming towns race for federal funds to fix aging water, sewer systems

By
Dustin Bleizeffer, WyoFile
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The Rawlins, Wyo. water treatment facility, pictured Sept. 16, 2022. (Dustin Bleizeffer/WyoFile)

After a town council shakeup, Micah Foster was suddenly mayor of his tiny eastern Wyoming agricultural town. A wave of resignations last April meant that in addition to getting up at 2 a.m. each day for his regular job — delivering bread to grocery stores for Bimbo Bakeries — Foster found himself running his 400-person town.

In June, as Foster was still adjusting to his new role, he got some good news. Lingle was awarded a $1.4 million American Rescue Plan Act grant to upgrade aging sewage pipelines — a big deal for any small town, sparing it from having to borrow the money because it cannot possibly raise rates high enough to cover such an expense. Lingle even secured the required 10% match from the state, Foster said.

But there was a hitch. To complete the required engineering plan, the town still needed the cooperation of BNSF Railway to cross its tracks on the south side — a slow process and an effort that the town’s small, overworked staff struggled to accomplish.

Wyoming officials, in July, reminded town leaders that the engineering plan must be complete, contracts signed and the project “shovel-ready” by Oct. 1, or the state would be forced to revert, or claw back, the grant to pre-empt the federal government from taking the money back — from Lingle and the state.

“There’s no way we can get that done,” Foster said, adding, “We’re not Cheyenne,” referring to the capital city’s advantage in having a full professional staff. “We don’t have an engineer on staff to do this and push it. So we were happy [when initially approved for the grant] and then we were sad.

“It’s like dangling a carrot in front of you but it was never really there,” he added.

A segment of water line was removed to repair leaks in Rawlins, Wyo. over the 2024 Labor Day weekend. (Courtesy City of Rawlins)

Many Wyoming towns and entities that have been awarded ARPA grant dollars administered by the state worry they may suffer the same fate. In August, the Office of State Lands and Investments hosted a webinar with municipalities and others, striking a tone of urgency as staff reiterated the Oct. 1 deadline to prove ARPA grant projects are ready for shovels to hit dirt, or lose the money.

“We want to have this opportunity to make long-term investments with these dollars,” Wyoming Grants Management Office Administrator Christine Emminger told attendees. “So create the pressure on your contractors to get these dollars obligated, get them contracted at your local government or your entity level. Because if they are not contracted, and you do not provide that evidence to the Office of the State Lands and Investments (OSLI), we will have to go back and recapture those dollars.”

More than 50 of 159 state-administered ARPA grant recipients for water and sewer projects have yet to file completed compliance documents to avoid recapture, according to state officials.

“OSLI is in regular communication with all the entities that have not yet provided the necessary information, and are making every effort to provide assistance, where possible,” Gov. Mark Gordon’s press secretary Michael Pearlman told WyoFile. 

The state is also facing a tight deadline, and is at risk of losing potentially tens of millions of federal dollars that budget-strapped communities desperately need. Wyoming’s mineral royalty revenues, which used to fund such water infrastructure funds, are drying up due to the declining coal industry.

State officials, under the guidance of the governor’s office, will determine in October which ARPA grants to claw back, then rush to “redeploy” those dollars before the federal government’s Dec. 31 deadline, they say.  Though Gordon has indicated his priorities for redeploying ARPA dollars, exactly who and what projects the state might choose before the end of the year is yet to be determined.

“Any funds available after the Oct. 1 deadline may be deployed to local governments to reimburse or reduce local matches for previously approved water infrastructure projects,” according to an Aug. 19 press release from the governor’s office.

Meanwhile, there’s an increasingly urgent need among Wyoming towns to update water and sewer systems.

A stockpile of bottled water was collected to help residents in Rawlins and Sinclair, Wyo. to get through a temporary boil advisory in March 2022. (Courtesy City of Rawlins)

The neighboring oil boom-and-bust towns of Midwest and Edgerton in the middle of the historic Salt Creek oilfield are relying on ARPA dollars to help cover an estimated $5 million cost to replace 7 miles of potable water pipeline at risk of corrosion due to acidic soils in the oilfield.

In the neighboring towns of Kemmerer and Diamondville (with a combined population of about 3,000) in the state’s southwest corner, town officials have described a chicken-and-egg dilemma to fund long-overdue upgrades necessary to not only meet current demands, but to meet the needs of construction workers arriving for the $4 billion Natrium nuclear energy project already underway. The construction workforce is expected to peak at 1,600 in 2028, although many of the workers will commute from other nearby towns, according to officials. Project developers, backed by both the U.S. Department of Energy and Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates, say it’s up to local government entities in Wyoming or the federal government to make any needed investments.

Human-caused climate change plays a role, too, forcing many towns to consider increasing competition for secure sources of water made more scarce due to warming and drying trends.

Cascading water challenges

Sometimes when you patch a leak, you spring another one down the line. Then another, and another.

That was the challenge for city water crews in Rawlins over Labor Day weekend. They chased and patched six leaks at gushing “weak points” in the aging municipal water system that serves both Rawlins and neighboring Sinclair without major interruptions to water deliveries, according to officials.

It’s a routine that many water crews in Wyoming towns have become well practiced at in recent years: Fixing one leak in a frangible network begets another — a result of depressurizing then re-pressurizing segments of pipe. The problem worsens when you’re dealing with an aging system long overdue for upgrades.

And towns like Rawlins aren’t just patching leaks. They’re looking at systemwide water and sewer upgrades vital to simply meet existing demand, not to mention potential population growth and previously unfathomed pressures of climate change.

In March 2022, Rawlins residents were under a boil order for nearly a week due to a “catastrophic” failure in the 100-plus-year-old wood-stave pipelines that deliver the majority of water to the municipal system from springs 30 miles south of town. 

In addition to the expense and task of gradually upgrading the wooden pipelines — nearly 2 miles have been replaced so far — the town also brought back online a long-derelict pre-water treatment plant so it can supplement its water supply by pumping from the North Platte River, as needed. Flow from the springs that provide Rawlins and Sinclair most of their water varies greatly, depending on seasonal snowpack, according to city officials. And those seasonal flows are only becoming more unpredictable.

All told, it will take nearly $60 million for necessary water system upgrades, according to Rawlins officials. They’ve already had some success landing grant dollars from state and federal sources, including ARPA dollars. But to secure those grants, and other funds in the form of loans, water users have been asked to pony up.

The average residential water utility bill has increased by about $30 per month since 2022, officials say. 

“Our rates were too low to support the maintenance and the work that we have to do on our lines,” Rawlins City Manager Tom Sarvey said. 

“A lot of these grants or loans require that you show community buy-in,” Rawlins spokesperson Mira Miller said. “So you can’t apply for these things if you can’t show that you are charging your customers a fair rate.”

Rawlins — because it’s been in emergency mode for the past two years — is confident about the security of its state-administered ARPA funding so far, according to officials. But many other towns with pressing water system improvement needs aren’t so sure.

Many small towns, even those that clearly qualify for federal grants, struggle to complete engineering and other required planning in the arduous process due to a basic lack of resources and expertise, Wyoming Association of Municipalities Member Services Manager Justin Schilling said.

Kemmerer, population 2,800, was selected as the host community for TerraPower’s Natrium nuclear reactor power plant. (Dustin Bleizeffer/WyoFile)

“Municipal government, it’s a constant rotation of people, so they might not have been aware how urgent [completing grant requirements] was,” Schilling said. “So, we had a bunch of these small communities that got a lifeline tossed to them, but because of engineering delays, the state’s got to pull it back and slide it to shovel-ready projects so that it doesn’t just go back to the feds.”

State officials, in their August webinar with ARPA recipients in the state, fielded about a dozen questions from concerned community leaders.

“I know the process has been cumbersome,” State Loan and Investments Grants and Loans Manager Beth Blackwell told attendees, adding that state officials knew all along that the ARPA requirements were going to be a major challenge for many small, resource-strapped towns to meet. “My staff is working extremely hard, and it’s just, we’ve got to make sure that at the end of the day, the state’s not on the hook to paying these funds back.”

In Lingle, without the ARPA grant, there’s no alternative plan in the works to fund the wastewater system upgrades, Mayor Foster said.

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

Some of Arizona’s most valuable water could soon hit the market 

By
Brett Walton, Circle of Blue
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The Colorado River Indian Tribes have the right to divert 662,402 acre-feet of water per year from the Colorado River for use on their lands in Arizona. Congress recently granted the tribes authority to lease some of this water to entities elsewhere in the state. (Brett Walton/Circle of Blue)

PARKER, Arizona – South of Headgate Rock Dam, beyond riverbanks lined with willow and mesquite, the broad floodplain of the Colorado River spreads across emerald fields and sun-bleached earth. 

The Colorado River has nourished these lands in present-day western Arizona for millennia, from the ancestral Mohave people who cultivated corn, squash, beans, and melons, to the contemporary farmers of the Colorado River Indian Tribes, or CRIT, whose reservation extends for 56 miles along its namesake river.  

CRIT has rights to divert a large volume of Colorado River water – nearly 720,000 acre-feet in Arizona and California combined, which is more than twice Nevada’s allocation from the river. To this point, the water has remained within the bounds of the CRIT reservation. But soon, the water might flow to lands far beyond CRIT’s borders.  

Due to an act of Congress signed into law in January 2023, CRIT now has the authority to lease or exchange its water for use elsewhere in Arizona. (The authority does not apply to water rights held by CRIT on the California portion of its reservation.) Agreements signed in April with the Arizona Department of Water Resources and the federal Bureau of Reclamation to fulfill administrative requirements in the legislation brought the tribes another step closer to greater control over their water. 

What remains is the work of negotiation, both within CRIT and with potential leaseholders. CRIT leadership must decide what it wants in leasing deals – how much water to part with, to whom, for what price, and for how many years. And they will have to find a partner who agrees to those terms. 

CRIT’s leasing authority opens a new chapter, not only for the tribes but for other water users in the state who might covet CRIT’s high-value, high-priority Colorado River water. Leasing this water would represent a financial windfall for CRIT’s more than 4,600 enrolled members. CRIT leadership has framed it as an economic and civic development opportunity. For those on the other side of the deal – be they environmental groups, farm districts, mining companies, or fast-growing cities in the center of the state – it is a rare chance for a relatively secure source of water in an arid region where most supplies are already claimed or running out. Homebuilders west of Phoenix, for instance, have recently seen their access to local groundwater restricted by state regulators.  

For CRIT leaders, the new powers come at an auspicious time. They see their duty as stewards of the river intersecting with the mounting challenges of maintaining Arizona’s desert empire amid merciless heat and a drying climate. 

“With the climate crisis and the drought going on at the present time, there’s going to be a major shortage of water,” Dwight Lomayesva, CRIT Tribal Council vice chairman, said at a conference in March. “But we would like to be part of the solution to the problem.” 

A valuable asset 

CRIT is a union of sorts. Four tribes with distinct histories live on the 278,000-acre reservation that spans Arizona and California. The Mohave, known for farming and beadwork, and the Chemehuevi, masterful basket weavers, were original inhabitants of the land. The Hopi and Navajo came later. The federal Bureau of Indian Affairs relocated members of the two northeastern Arizona tribes to the area after World War Two. 

Some 79,350 acres are farmed on the Arizona portion of CRIT’s reservation. More acres are dedicated to alfalfa than any other crop. (Brett Walton/Circle of Blue)

CRIT’s history and location translate into a strong water rights position. Like in most western states, water in Arizona is based on a priority system. “First in time, first in right,” as the saying goes. Junior users, who have a later priority date, are cut off first in times of shortage, while senior users like CRIT who have earlier claims can continue to divert. 

CRIT’s reservation along the banks of the Colorado was established in 1865, making it one of the first in time in Arizona for water rights – and one of the last to lose access to water. Crucially, leased water retains its place in the priority system. That’s what makes it valuable, said Cynthia Campbell, the water resources management adviser for Phoenix. “That’s front of the line, basically.” 

Not only does CRIT have secure water. The tribes also have a lot of it. Comparatively speaking, their water rights are massive. A display at the CRIT Museum makes the point visually. Tubes of foam insulation painted blue depict the volume of water held by tribes along the lower Colorado River. CRIT has the right to divert 662,402 acre-feet per year to its Arizona lands and 56,846 acre-feet to its much smaller landholdings across the river in California. The museum display reflects this bounty – the blue foam bar representing CRIT’s water towers over the others. 

For now, CRIT is keeping its water leasing intentions close to the vest. Chairwoman Amelia Flores and Tribal Council members declined to be interviewed for this story.  

John Bezdek, CRIT’s lawyer, said that Tribal Council had been focused on finalizing the state and federal agreements and is now turning its attention to how it might structure leases. “There’s a number of additional steps that need to be done in terms of developing a water code, developing provisions on how proposals will be evaluated, looking at those types of things,” Bezdek said. “And so that is all being done right now. We’re working on the next steps internally.” 

Despite that public reticence, the contours of CRIT’s thinking have been previewed in other venues. Vice Chairman Dwight Lomayesva outlined his thoughts on the matter in a panel discussion earlier this year, when he participated in the Eccles Family Rural West Conference, held in Tempe, on March 27. 

Lomayesva reiterated the cultural and spiritual significance of the Colorado River to his people. “We want to save the river,” he said. “We’re not just a benevolent nation trying to help other countries and tribes and water districts.”  

Dwight Lomayesva, vice chairman of the Colorado River Indian Tribes, speaks at the Eccles Family Rural West Conference, held in Tempe, Arizona, on March 27, 2024. (Courtesy Bill Lane Center for the American West, Stanford University)

CRIT has a history of working with state and federal agencies to protect the Colorado River. The tribes participated in a pilot farmland fallowing program from 2016 to2019, in which they saved 45,373 acre-feet for storage in Lake Mead. That deal was the precursor to a larger commitment in 2020, when the tribes pledged to fallow 10,000 acres of farmland and store 50,000 acre-feet of water per year in the basin’s largest reservoir. For the three-year effort, the tribe earned $38 million, from the state and the Environmental Defense Fund. 

CRIT’s capacity to lease water is directly related to the farming operations that take place on the reservation. About 79,350 acres are farmed on its Arizona lands, mostly for alfalfa. Some of the land is farmed by a tribal enterprise, but many of the acres are leased by non-tribal members. A majority of the fields are flood irrigated, an inefficient method in which only half of the water is taken up by the crop. The rest eventually flows back to the river or evaporates. 

This is important because CRIT can only lease water that it has put to consumptive use in at least three of the previous five years. The consumptive-use stipulation is part of the agreement signed with Arizona and Reclamation in April. CRIT diverts less Colorado River water than its allocation, so the agreement dictates that the tribes can’t part with unused water to which they have rights but bypasses their fields. In effect, it means that water conserved from farming is water that can be leased. 

“That’s a very, very important component that we then have to factor into in terms of how we want to develop the program,” Bezdek said. 

A huge impediment is CRIT’s obsolete means of moving water to its fields. The Bureau of Indian Affairs, a federal agency, owns and operates the Colorado River Irrigation Project, an irrigation system that is, by all accounts, deteriorating and badly needs repair. It was developed piecemeal starting in the 1870s and diverts water into the main line canal at Headrock Gate Dam. Two-thirds of the 232 miles of lateral canal are made of packed dirt, Lomayesva said. (All quotes from Lomayesva in this piece are from his comments at the March conference.) 

Lomayesva said that one study pegged the cost of rehabilitating the system at $300 million – an amount of money that CRIT cannot afford. And even if it could, Lomayesva said that because the tribes do not own the water delivery infrastructure, they would hesitate to invest in it. But he said that leasing deals could provide the capital for farming on the reservation to become more efficient. 

“We’re going to only market the water if we can use those funds to develop conservation systems – sprinklers instead of flood [irrigation], pipes instead of dirt ditches, recycle some of that water and reuse it again,” Lomayesva said. “That’s the only reason why we would market our water.” 

Others have concluded that the outdated irrigation system is a hindrance. “The high cost to repair infrastructure, including lining canals, reconstructing gates and turnouts, and realigning reaches of the system, limit the Tribes’ ability to realize the full potential value of its water,” according to a 2018 Bureau of Reclamation study. 

CRIT recently asked BIA to increase the amount it charges for irrigation water because the tribes believe that the system is underfunded and additional revenue could improve the irrigation infrastructure. 

BIA did not respond to interview requests. 

The Bureau of Indian Affairs, a federal agency, owns and operates the canal system that supplies the Colorado River Indian Tribes reservation with irrigation water. The system, which draws from the Colorado River, was developed piecemeal starting in the 1870s and needs repair. (Brett Walton/Circle of Blue)

Tribal members voted on an ordinance in 2019 that endorsed leasing and set certain boundaries for its implementation. The ordinance, which passed with 63 percent of the vote, was the result of an attempt a year earlier to recall all nine council members over some residents’ objections to leasing. Two council members, including former chairman Dennis Patch, lost their seats. 

Under the ordinance, Tribal Council intends that the same number of acres will be farmed after water is leased. “We are farmers,” Lomayesva said. “We are farmers first, and we will probably always be farmers. And we want to continue farming. But the savings from conservation efforts, we could make some of that water available.” 

The way for that to happen is for farming on the reservation to become more efficient – and that means applying less water to the fields. It could happen through conservation. But what tribal leaders like Lomayesva really want is a better irrigation system. 

“Water could be made available for conservation or off-reservation leasing, exchange or storage in accordance with the requirements of the federal legislation and agreements if deferred maintenance was addressed along with improvements to the irrigation project,” according to a statement from the tribal government. 

How much water might be available? In 2018, CRIT participated in a Bureau of Reclamation study to assess current and future tribal water use in the Colorado River basin. CRIT told Reclamation to assume that up to 150,000 acre-feet per year might be leased and moved off the reservation by 2060. CRIT used the same figure in a December 7, 2020, public meeting discussing the proposed legislation to authorize leasing. However, at the end of July the tribal government said in a statement, “No decisions have been made on a baseline amount of water to be available for leasing.” 

What about the length of the leases? Many leases signed as part of a settlement extend for 99 or 100 years. CRIT’s authorizing legislation caps leases or exchange agreements at 100 years. But otherwise CRIT will be a free agent, able to negotiate its terms. Several water policy experts in Arizona interviewed for this story said they heard CRIT was considering a lease length of 25 years. The tribes, however, said in a statement that they have not decided any lease parameters. 

Farming is a cultural legacy and economic driver for the Colorado River Indian Tribes. (Brett Walton/Circle of Blue)

The length is significant because of state water supply rules for municipalities. The Arizona Department of Water Resources requires proof of a 100-year supply. A shorter lease would not fully satisfy that requirement, but the water could be used in other ways, said Kathryn Sorensen, the former director of the Phoenix water department. It could be stored underground to offset groundwater pumping, or be paired with other water to fulfill the state’s 100-year directive. In the end, it will be a cost-benefit analysis for cities whether to lease CRIT water with a shorter term, she said. 

“Each provider is going to have to weigh the length of the lease versus the priority and weigh the value,” said Sorensen, who is now with the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University. “But, look, it’s the highest priority Colorado River water in the state. So it’s bound to be very valuable, even with a short [lease] term.” 

Autonomy and flexibility 

Though it has liquid riches, this form of tribal wealth has been stuck in place. Tribes elsewhere in Arizona determined their rights to the Colorado, Gila, Salt, Verde and other rivers through negotiated settlements.  

In these agreements, tribes generally ceded a portion of their historical rights in exchange for state and federal funding to build the infrastructure that would deliver water to their lands. A settlement currently before Congress – the Northeastern Arizona Indian Water Rights Settlement – is the largest yet, a $5 billion proposal to determine water rights and build water supply and energy generation systems for the Navajo Nation, Hopi Tribe, and San Juan Southern Paiute. 

Those settlements typically include leasing provisions. Twenty-four tribes in the West and eight in Arizona currently have leasing authority. The Fort McDowell Indian Community’s settlement, approved by Congress in 1990, for instance, sends 4,300 acre-feet a year to Phoenix. The lease extends for 99 years. Other central Arizona cities, including Gilbert, Glendale, Mesa, and Scottsdale, lease Colorado River water from the tribes, as do mining companies and a housing developer.  

CRIT, however, is an entirely different case study. The tribes did not receive their water through a settlement. Their rights were part of the U.S. Supreme Court decree in 1964 that resolved a Colorado River quarrel between Arizona and California and set water allocations in the lower basin. The decree granted CRIT a significant volume of Colorado River water but it did not confer the right to lease. Instead, CRIT had to seek the blessings of Congress to gain leasing authority.  

CRIT is now celebrating that authority. In April, three weeks before the state and federal agreements were signed, the tribes held a Water Rights Day, a community festival “honoring our continued commitment to the living river.” 

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. 

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