There are just over two weeks left for the seven states that depend on the Colorado River to come to an agreement on how to manage its dwindling water resources. This water is critical to millions of people and agricultural acres across the river’s basin, as well as key sectors of California’s fresh produce industry.
If the states can’t agree on a management plan for the Colorado River by Feb. 14, the federal government may step in with its plans. Experts doubt those plans will solve the issues facing the Colorado River, however, and say it could likely result in decades of lawsuits and uncertainty.
While the states have been at an impasse for over two years now, California water and irrigation experts are hopeful for cooperation ahead of the deadline.
“It’s important that we remember as we move forward that we’re all in this together,” says Frank Venegas, water technician for the Fort Yuma Quechan Indian Tribe. “We have to develop partnerships. If we have some partnerships already, [we have] to make them stronger as we move forward into this next era of the negotiations.”
Venegas was one of several panelists who spoke during a Jan. 28 webinar hosted by the California Natural Resources Agency. Panelists spoke on the relevance of the Colorado River water to California, the challenges facing it, what has happened to address those challenges and what needs to happen in the future of its management.
Not Enough Water to Go Around
Seven states and Mexico depend on and share the water of the Colorado River. The states are divided into the Upper Basin (Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico) and the Lower Basin (California, Arizona and Nevada).
However, much like the situation between the U.S. and Mexico on the Rio Grande, the Colorado River is overallocated.
Michael Anderson, California state climatologist, explained during the webinar that the average flow through the river from 1910 to 2000 was roughly 15 million acre-feet annually. The 1922 Colorado River Compact operated on this reality, stipulating that the Upper and Lower Basins would each receive 7.5 MAF annually. Of the Lower Basin’s total allocation, California receives the lion’s share at 4.4 MAF. This also makes it the largest single recipient of Colorado River water in the entire basin.
The 1922 compact granted any water over the states’ 15 MAF allocation to Mexico. The 1944 treaty between the U.S. and Mexico changed this, allocating an additional 1.5 MAF annually to Mexico. This brought the river’s total annual allocations to 16.5 MAF.
Since the early 2000s, however, average annual flow rates have been slightly over 12.5 MAF because of extended drought in the Colorado River Basin. Experts expect the stress on the river and its basin will continue due to climate change and continued warming in the West.
Anderson explains that a warmer West means more moisture will be pulled out of the landscape, including the Colorado River. At the same time, climate change means storms are bigger and more intense, as well as more spread out and less predictable. Warmer temperatures also mean that snowpacks, on which the Colorado River depends, are getting smaller and less dependable.
All these factors also compound on one another. For example, the drier things get, the more dust there is on the landscape.
“Dust from the deserts being blown up onto the snowpack makes it melt earlier, meaning you have that longer period of dryness in the basin to stress the landscape even further,” Anderson says. “So a lot of forces [are] working to make things more challenging in the basin, to be sure.”
California Produce Needs Colorado River Water
Challenges to the Colorado River Basin pose a threat to everyone and everything that depends on its water.
While roughly 40 million people across the entire basin depend on water from the Colorado River, the river’s water also makes specific sectors of fresh produce possible, particularly in California. Karla Nemeth, director of the California Department of Water Resources, points to the Imperial Irrigation District, which gets all of its water from the Colorado River Basin, as an example.
“Because they have such a long growing season with few days below freezing, the farmers in IID produce about two-thirds of the nation’s winter vegetables,” she says.
JB Hamby, vice chair of the IID board of directors and chair of the state’s Colorado River Board, quantifies the impact in another way, pointing to 600,000 acres “of highly productive farmland in production all-year round, some of the most high-value and productive in the basin.” He specifically names the Imperial Valley, Bard Valley, the land of the Fort Yuma Quechan Indian Tribe and the Coachella Valley in his example.
Robert Cheng, assistant general manager of the Coachella Valley Water District, says the area — known for its unique produce items like dates, citrus, melons and specialty vegetables — could not survive without Colorado River water.
“We really depend pretty heavily on the Colorado River Basin,” he says, noting that Colorado River water makes up 75% or more of the area’s imported water annually. “And despite holding senior Colorado River water rights, we also very much understand the importance of working these issues out collaboratively.”
Feb. 14: Deadline to a Decision
Collaboration on the Colorado River Basin has been complicated, however.
The 2007 agreement governing how water is managed along the Colorado River during times of shortages expired at the end of 2025. The 2007 rules will remain in effect until the end of the 2026 water year on Sept. 30. In what is often called “the post-2026 negotiations,” the seven basin states have been attempting to come up with a replacement management plan that all parties agree on for the past two years.
Thus far, no agreement has been reached.
On Jan. 16, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation released its own version of a water management plan for the Colorado River in the form of a draft environmental impact statement.
“The Department of the Interior is moving forward with this process to ensure environmental compliance is in place so operations can continue without interruption when the current guidelines expire,” Andrea Travnicek, USBR assistant secretary for water and science, said in the group’s announcement from Jan. 9. “The river and the 40 million people who depend on it cannot wait. In the face of an ongoing severe drought, inaction is not an option.”
The draft environmental impact statement examines five different strategies for managing Lake Powell and Lake Mead, the two key reservoirs along the Colorado River. While USBR has not identified a preferred alternative out of the five, it has given the seven states a Feb. 14 deadline to come up with an agreement or it may select one within its jurisdiction to pursue.
According to reporting from the Los Angeles Times, some of those alternatives are alarming for California and could “lead to lengthy litigation,” according to Shivaji Deshmukh, the general manager of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. Metropolitan is the country’s largest water district, serving almost 20 million people, and half of those who depend on the Colorado River for water.
Cooperation is Key
Deshmukh, who spoke at the Jan. 28 webinar, outlines the importance of the Colorado River water to his largely urban constituents. However, he also stresses the importance of partnership and collaborative efforts to reduce demand and cooperate with all water users.
“We have not pitted ourselves against flows of water in the environment or for agriculture, but rather figured out ways to partner, whether it is looking at ways to partner with the state on programs to better balance water supply throughout the state of California or very unique and agency-specific partnerships with our agricultural partners, including IID, Coachella Valley and the Quezon Tribe,” he says.
“We know that without a consensus approach to these negotiations, we could be left with some really severe cuts along the river,” he adds.
All other panelists and participants also call for cooperation and collaboration among the seven states.
“We’re really focused with working across states,” says Wade Crowfoot, secretary of the California Natural Resources Agency.
“We know that the future is going to be better when the seven states actually decide the path forward versus looking to the federal government or, at worst, getting mired in litigation, which really characterized so much water management over the last century in the basin,” he says.
