Sources say that California floated cutting major Southwest cities off of Colorado River water

The Colorado River and the Bureau of Reclamation: Why the Interior should not act on its own to regulate the hydropower needs of the Mead and Powell reservoirs

Interior said Friday it would soon issue a notice of intent saying the Bureau of Reclamation may need to modify the current operations of Glen Canyon Dam and reduce its water releases downstream – which could cause water levels at Mead to drop further. This would be done in order to make sure the Glen Canyon Dam can continue operating and generating power.

In the possible actions it laid out, Interior said it will consider using its federal authority to restrict water releases through the Glen Canyon and Hoover Dams to help maintain water in Mead and Powell – the nation’s two largest reservoirs – and prevent the dams from losing the ability to generate hydroelectricity.

Hydropower from the two dam is distributed to customers across eight states and experts are worried that they could stop generating power in the next few years.

“This one good year is not enough to alleviate the stress on the Colorado River,” said Paul Miller, a hydrologist at the River Forecast Office. It will take a number of above-average years to fill Lake Powell.

The question is who bears the brunt of the unprecedented cuts needed to keep Colorado River flowing into America’s largest reservoirs. It could set the stage for a heated legal battle if the feds were to use too much force.

Touton reiterated at a recent virtual event she would rather strike a deal with the states, but the Bureau was prepared to act on its own if necessary.

Sarah Porter, the director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University, said she believed it would make life a lot easier for the bureau and Secretary of Interior. It’s a signal that the bureau has not taken actions on their own.

The issue of who is the first in line to be given water when there is a cut goes to the heart of why California and Arizona have been unable to agree on water cuts.

Kelly said that 10 feet of water might not seem much, but it would boost the lake over the Tier2 water cuts threshold. The Tier 2 shortage meant that Arizona, Nevada and Mexico had to reduce their Colorado River water usage, with Arizona facing the largest cuts – 592,000 acre-feet – or approximately 21% of the state’s yearly allotment of river water.

Porter said that the Interior should include a no action alternative in the environmental impact statements to show how devastating an absence of action would be to the river system.

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The bureau says a final decision on the changes will be made in late summer. The decision would go into effect for the next water year, which begins in the fall of 2023.

Failing to do so means either of these lakes, the largest manmade reservoirs in the country, could reach “dead pool” in the next two years, where the water level is too low to flow through the dams and downstream to the communities and farmers that need it.

Western state officials wrote a letter in May agreeing to leave 1 million acre-feet of water in Lake Powell. Then, they watched as the same amount of water disappeared due to system losses and evaporation.

“Everything we tried to do through the May 3 letter was wiped out by mother nature,” top Arizona water official Tom Buschatzke told CNN. “We have to understand that could happen to us again. It’s been happening to us almost every year for the past few years.”

The anxiety is getting worse as the levels plummet. Negotiations between the Lower Basin states of California, Arizona and Nevada have been tense and closely watched.

Those talks have stalled amid disagreement on how much water each state should sacrifice and how much money farmers, tribal nations and cities should be paid to reduce their water consumption.

State negotiators are waiting for the feds to tell them how they will divvy up the $4 billion in relief money, which was part of the Inflation Reduction Act.

He says that because of uncertainty and not knowing what the difference is between the federal government’s money and voluntary cuts districts are unwilling to make it more difficult.

There is a chance that the federal government will step in if voluntary cuts aren’t enough. But that plan would almost assuredly be greeted with a court challenge.

Sarah Porter, the director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University, told CNN that federal officials are working carefully to prepare for the possibility that they would be sued over mandatory cuts, “so they can demonstrate it’s not an arbitrary action.”

At a December conference of Colorado River water users, Assistant Secretary of the Department of the Interior Tanya Trujillo addressed that likelihood, according to Porter.

As of last week, snowpack across much of the upper Colorado River Basin was between 120 and 140% of normal. And the Arizona state climatologist’s office recently reported that 2023 ranks in the top five years for the amount of water it expects to get out of the snowpack as it melts.

Isla Simpson, aclimate scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said that climate change is going to make dry years worse.

Since the 1980’s, the Southwest region has seen a steady decline in precipitation. Simpson said decades-long lack of rain and a rise in planet-heating emissions have worsened the conditions.

Dry air is able to evaporate water from the soil. This is another reason water shortages are plaguing the Colorado River; not only is there enough rain to fill reservoirs, but the air also sucks up water from what’s left of them.

She says there is a high chance that the lack of rain won’t go away soon. During the winter, the jet stream shifts northward because of La Nia, which causes upper-level winds to carry storms around the globe. That will cause less precipitation in a region that desperately needs it.

The Colorado River Water Problem: When California and Arizona aren’t playing with fire, but will the Supreme Court step in addressing the problem?

The maximum amount of basin wide cuts proposed by the six states is over three million acres per year. If the levels of the lake fall to catastrophically low conditions, it could kick in.

Climate change and years of mismanagement by both California and Arizona has led to a crisis in a river system that is in deep need of water.

“The lack of a consensus and six states moving forward with an approach that does not harmonize with the law is troubling,” Hamby said. “It is everyone’s best interest to avoid litigation, but being put into a situation like this where you have six states approaching things in this way raises the risk.”

“I think California is playing with fire here,” said David Hayes, a former top climate aide to President Joe Biden, now at Stanford University Law School. “This issue is bigger than any group of water rights holders. The implications of not addressing this issue could affect the economy of the entire state of California.”

Negotiations and outside watchers are expecting litigation that could wind up at the Supreme Court this year as state consensus becomes harder to reach and the federal government becomes more assertive.

“I don’t know if the Supreme Court would take it,” Wade Noble, a lawyer representing Yuma, Arizona, farmers and irrigation districts, told CNN. “I suspect everybody who has been lawyering up wants to make sure their legal team has Supreme Court experience. These are the types of issues that get there.”

The Imperial Irrigation District can use the same amount of Colorado River water per year as Arizona and Nevada.

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/30/us/colorado-river-water-california-arizona-climate/index.html

Water Rights in the Valley of the Colorado River: Negotiating a Supreme Court Action against a Planned Deficit of Water

“We’re not going to give up a century of history and position and things that people worked for over a century to protect in two days,” Hamby said of the recent negotiations. “Doing away with the priority approach is not something that’s acceptable.”

“Decisions to cut back water deliveries below the Hoover Dam cannot wait for a complex water rights case to be litigated up through the Supreme Court. It can take a long time. No legal decision will solve the fundamental problem of insufficient water. That reality needs to be faced.”

California was proposing following the “law of the river,” which gives farmers in major agricultural districts first dibs on water because they have a priority claim established before other districts’ rights – including Californian cities like Los Angeles, which receives around half of its water from the Colorado River.

The people familiar with the discussions said that the proposal was quickly rejected by other state officials at the negotiating table.

The proposal was important for public health and safety in Western cities, said John Enstminger, general manger of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, who was not present at the session.

“If you want to model cutting off most or all of the water supply of 27 million Americans, you can go through the exercise but implementing that on the ground would have the direst consequence for almost 10% of the country,” Entsminger said.

Tom Buschatzke wouldn’t talk about the closed-door discussion. He told CNN that Arizona would not consider cutting their biggest cities off from the Colorado River water.

“I would not, even under a modeling scenario, agree or ask the federal government to model a scenario in which the Central Arizona Project goes to zero,” Buschatzke said. “I will not do that. If CAP went to zero, the implications would be a lot worse. Severe for tribes, severe for cities, severe for industries.”

The Upper Colorado River Commission: State-Level Negotiations and the Suspension of Flaming Gorge Releases During Lake Powell’s Decline

But multiple states told CNN that they are going to try to continue to get an agreement everyone can support, while acknowledging talks so far have been difficult.

Chuck Cullom is the executive director of the Upper Colorado River Commission.

The six-state proposal was a very positive outcome and the head of the Arizona water department said he and others would try to keep talking with California.

“I’m committed to continuing to work with all seven states,” Buschatzke said, adding additional conversations and negotiations would continue “over the next few months.”

“They haven’t shared with us any cumulative ballpark,” he said. It will be less of a gap to close because we know the ballpark at least and it will be the specific number, that is what I believe.

Four states in the upper Colorado River Basin requested the suspension of Flaming Gorge releases. The Upper Colorado River Commission executive director said that the system was similar to a water loan program.

Lake Powell in late February sank to its lowest water level since the reservoir was filled in the 1960s, and since 2000 has dropped more than 150 feet.

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“We’re well ahead of where we need to be from a snowpack perspective,” said Paul Miller, a hydrologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Colorado Basin River Forecast Center. We are very confident that we are in a good spot. This year is a good year to try and save water, to try to conserve water as best as we can; we have a lot of space in our reservoirs.”

“We do need to see what the runoff is going to be; I’m hoping it’s going to be good,” said Arizona’s top water official Tom Buschatzke. Still, Buschatzke cautioned that hydrology can taper off in the spring; with the nation’s largest reservoirs so precipitously low, one year is not going to make enough of a difference.

He said that if it tracks the way it has been tracking it will buy them at most six months or a year. “It’s not going to stabilize the system in any meaningful way.”

The first round of voluntary, short-term water cuts in the Southwest will be declared soon after months of negotiations with farmers, tribes and cities.

Top officials at the Department of Interior and Reclamation recently told a group of Western senators that they expect to be able to save up to 10 feet of elevation in Lake Mead – or about 650,000 acre-feet of water. That water savings will cost about $250 million of the total $4 billion, Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona, who was in the meeting, told CNN.

Farmers will fallow fields for one to three years to save water. The longer a farmer is in a field, the more money they get. A one-year agreement gets $330 per acre-foot, two years gets $365 per acre-foot, and three years gets $400 per acre-foot.

Kelly said that more of the $4 billion fund will go toward long-term water savings, such as helping the west’s farmers install irrigation systems that use less water.

Kelly said that the amount of water you get for different types of programs starts to add up. “One thing is clear. Putting that $4 billion into the Inflation Reduction Act for the immediate needs of this crisis is a game changer.”