The Colorado River states are still divided – so much so that they could not reach a broad agreement on how to manage the river by their federal deadline.
The Department of the Interior gave seven Western states, including Colorado, until Tuesday to indicate whether they can reach any level of accord on how the water supply for 40 million people should be managed in the future. The current agreement, which has governed how key reservoirs store and release water supplies since 2007, expires Dec. 31. Its rules remain in effect until fall of 2026.
For months, negotiators representing the states have been at loggerheads over what the new set of rules will look like.
In a joint statement Tuesday, the seven states and federal officials said they recognize the seriousness of the basin’s challenges as drought and low reservoirs have put pressure on the river’s water supplies.
“While more work needs to be done, collective progress has been made that warrants continued efforts to define and approve details for a finalized agreement,” the officials said in a statement released by the state of Arizona.
In June, the federal government asked states to pin down the broad strokes of an agreement by November. But the initial prepared statement did not address any key questions about a potential agreement – for example, which reservoirs will it manage? How long will the agreement last?
Nor did it resolve sticking points that have long stumped the negotiators.
The state and federal officials must decide how to plan for an uncertain water future in a changing climate with nearly empty reservoir savings banks. They’re thinking of the water needs of tribal nations and environmental impacts to the Colorado River ecosystems and landscapes like the Grand Canyon.
The officials are also weighing which cities, farms, industries and environments would be hit by cutbacks in dry years, and how that could impact the future of businesses, neighborhoods and long-held traditions.
That’s a big issue for Arizona, according to a letter from the state to the Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum on Tuesday.
The letter said water security in Arizona was a matter of national security, in part because of its role in growing winter food and hosting emerging technologies, like data centers.
“With such high stakes for Arizona and the Nation, we find it alarming that the Upper Basin States have repeatedly refused to implement any volume of binding, verifiable water supply reductions,” the letter from the governor and legislators said.
Colorado, which is in the Upper Basin, has committed to voluntary, temporary conservation. State officials, including Colorado’s negotiator, Becky Mitchell, oppose mandatory cuts in the basin’s driest years, saying Coloradans are already forced by Mother Nature to cut back and downstream states are overusing their share.
“While I cannot speak directly to the comments in the letter, heightened rhetoric is not helpful at this time,” Mitchell said via email Tuesday.
In Tuesday’s joint statement, the states and federal officials indicated the officials are still working toward a joint agreement.
“Through continued cooperation and coordinated action, there is a shared commitment to ensuring the long-term sustainability and resilience of the Colorado River system,” it said.
Starting in 2000, the seemingly water-rich river basin dipped into drought – one with no end in sight. By 2007, federal and state officials had negotiated the now-expiring agreement outlining how to adjust reservoir releases in drier years.
The plan focused on two major reservoirs: Lake Powell, on the Utah-Arizona border, and Lake Mead, on the Arizona-Nevada border. These immense reservoirs determine the flow of water through the basin and act like savings banks for drier years.
Together, they can store up to 53.9 million acre-feet of water, or about 92% of the reservoir storage capacity in the entire Colorado River Basin. One acre-foot roughly equals the annual water use of two to three households. It’s enough to cover one acre of farmland in one foot of water.
Farmers, cities, ecosystems and industries all rely on water from the Colorado River and its tributaries. The basin’s communities slowly launched conservation programs or changed planting practices to adapt. Water officials made new drought-response agreements.
But the drought continued for more than two decades. Lake Mead’s water level fell almost 148 feet between the beginning of 2000 and 2025. Lake Powell’s level fell by 112 feet. The water levels dropped to the brink of crisis in 2022 and as of this month, the reservoirs are still at about a third of their capacity.
Since 2022, federal, state and tribal officials have debated what new management plans for the basin and its key reservoirs would look like after August 2026. (Mexico is working with the U.S. on a parallel process.)
In the U.S., federal officials, seven states, 30 tribal nations, cities, environmental groups and industries like agriculture, recreation and mining are all weighing in on the river’s future.
Developing a plan involves deciding which reservoirs will be managed, how they’ll release water, and how long the new agreement will last – but also much more complicated than that.
It might seem simple to decide how much and when Glen Canyon Dam will release water from Lake Powell. But that decision has big implications for the Grand Canyon, Lake Mead, the interstate water sharing obligations for all states, and downstream farmers, cities and industries in the Lower Basin – Arizona, California and Nevada.
In March 2024, the four Upper Basin states – Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming – shared their vision for what future management should look like. The three Lower Basin states released a competing vision at the same time.
In November 2024, the Biden administration released details on several management options based on input from states, tribes, environmental groups and other experts.
Three months later, the Lower Basin states called on the new Trump administration to come up with new options, saying the Biden alternatives didn’t adequately consider the Lower Basin proposal.
“We’ve been going through a process in figuring out what changes we want to make to those draft alternatives,” Scott Cameron, acting head of the Bureau of Reclamation, told Upper Basin officials during an Upper Colorado River Commission meeting in June.
The negotiators have spent months suggesting and discarding ideas without publicly announcing any firm decisions.
In the absence of a clear consensus on the basics of a seven-state agreement, the Department of the Interior is moving forward with its process.
The federal agency will release a draft in December outlining its options for how to manage the basin starting in 2026. Once the draft is out, the department will open a public comment period this winter as state, tribal and federal officials nail down the details of the states’ plan.
If the states cannot agree, the feds will decide how the basin’s water is managed. The federal government already has significant authority in the Lower Basin. But federal officials have also said they could leverage their authority over federal water projects in the Upper Basin, like Blue Mesa and the Colorado River Storage Project, to manage water in coming years.
The states could also take the matter to court, which could take decades to resolve and would put water management in the hands of judges instead of Colorado River communities, experts say.
If the seven states can share a detailed agreement by Feb. 14 – or March at the latest – the feds can drop it into their planning process, Cameron said in June.
The federal agency plans to have a final decision signed by May or June, he said.
