Coloradans’ share of the Colorado River will not change under the federal government’s new operating plans for the critical waterway for at least the next two years.
The U.S. Department of the Interior on Friday published a highly anticipated plan for the Colorado River that will guide how the basin’s two major reservoirs will operate and how the shrinking river’s water will be allocated across the southwest for the next two years.
While Colorado and the other Upper Basin states — New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — will face no mandatory cuts, the Lower Basin states of Arizona, California and Nevada will see their collective supply cut by 1.25 million acre-feet in each of the next two years. An acre-foot of water is enough water for two families’ annual needs.
During negotiations, leaders from the Lower Basin states offered to reduce their consumption, and the federal plan implements cuts of similar size. While the federal government has the authority to mandate cuts in the Lower Basin, it does not have similar power over the Upper Basin states, which sit above the river’s two major reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead.
The decision Friday is the culmination of years of negotiations, studies, public comment periods and modeling. Negotiators from the seven Colorado River basin states first set out to craft a plan to manage the critical waterway for decades. But the negotiators couldn’t agree on a plan, forcing the federal government to implement its own rules for the river.