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Southern California cities will likely provide money that could fund fallowing farmland in places like Imperial County and water managers are considering leaving water they’ve stored in Lake Mead as part of their contribution.Īrizona will probably be hit hard with reductions. Water districts, in particular Imperial Irrigation District, have been adamant that any voluntary cut must not curtail their high priority water rights. Hasencamp, the Metropolitan Water District’s Colorado River resource manager, said all the districts in California that draw from the river had agreed to contribute water or money to the plan, pending approval by their respective boards. Lower basin states have yet to go public with plans to contribute, but officials said last week that the states’ tentative proposal under discussion fell slightly short of the federal government’s request to cut 2 to 4 million acre-feet.Īn acre-foot of water is enough to serve 2-3 households annually.
“It’s going to come to a head particularly if the upper basin states continue their negotiating position, saying, ‘We’re not making any cuts,’” said Bruce Babbitt, who served as Interior secretary from 2003-2011. That position, however, is unsatisfactory to many in lower basin states already facing cuts. “The focus is getting the tools in place and working with water users to get as much as we can rather than projecting a water number,” Chuck Cullom, the executive director of the Upper Colorado River Commission, told The Associated Press. In a letter last month, representatives from the upper basin states proposed a five-point conservation plan they said would save water, but argued most cuts needed to come from the lower basin. He said it was his job to protect Utah’s allocation for growth projected for decades ahead: “The direction we’ve been given as water purveyors is to make sure we have water for the future.”
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Gene Shawcroft, the chairman of Utah’s Colorado River Authority, believes the lower basin states should take most of the cuts because they use most of the water and their full allocations. The upper basin states have historically not used their full allocations but want to maintain water rights to plan for population growth. The lower basin states use most of the water and have thus far shouldered most of the cuts.
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The proposals for supplemental cuts due this week have inflamed disagreement between upper basin states - Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming - and lower basin states - Arizona, California and Nevada - over how to spread the pain. Last year, federal officials for the first time declared a water shortage, triggering cuts to Nevada, Arizona and Mexico’s share of the river to help prevent the two largest reservoirs - Lake Powell and Lake Mead - from dropping low enough to threaten hydropower production and stop water from flowing through their dams. As the river yielded less water, the states agreed to cuts tied to the levels of reservoirs that store its water.
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states under a series of agreements that date back a century, to a time when more flowed.īut climate change has transformed the river’s hydrology, providing less snowmelt and causing hotter temperatures and more evaporation. Water from the river is divided among Mexico and the seven U.S. About 70% of its water goes toward irrigation, sustaining a $15 billion-a-year agricultural industry that supplies 90% of the United States’ winter vegetables.
It’s the primary water supply for 40 million people. The Colorado River cascades from the Rocky Mountains into the arid deserts of the Southwest. Agricultural districts in those states are asking to be paid generously to bear that burden.īut the tentative agreements fall short of what the Bureau of Reclamation has demanded and state officials say they hope for more time to negotiate details. Officials party to discussions said the most likely targets for cuts are Arizona and California farmers. Representatives from the seven states convened in Denver last week for last minute negotiations behind closed doors. “It’s not fun sitting around a table figuring out who is going to sacrifice and how much,” said Bill Hasencamp, the Colorado River resources manager at Metropolitan Water District, which provides water to most of Southern California. Tensions over the extent of the cuts and how to spread them equitably have flared, with states pointing fingers and stubbornly clinging to their water rights despite the looming crisis. “The challenges we are seeing today are unlike anything we have seen in our history,” Camille Touton, the bureau’s commissioner, said at a U.S.
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