Federal Officials Announce Colorado River Water Cuts for California, Nevada and Arizona
Federal officials on Friday announced sharp water cuts from the Colorado River for California, Nevada and Arizona over the next two years, a forceful recognition that the river's reservoirs are no longer able to meet the demands of a fast-growing, long-parched West.
Under the Bureau of Reclamation's plan, the three states will collectively reduce water use by 1.25 million acre-feet annually during that period, with the possibility of even deeper reductions if reservoir conditions worsen.
Arizona will bear the largest share of the cuts. Upstream states — Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico — face no reductions for now. Mexico, under a U.S.-Mexico treaty allocation, will reduce its intake by 250,000 acre-feet.
“We've been in this 26-year prolonged drought period,” said Andrea Travnicek, the Interior Department's assistant secretary for water and science. “We continue to see a prolonged drought in our future. So continuing to work together as a whole within the basin is going to be extremely important.”
The Colorado River serves as a water supply for an estimated 35 million to 40 million people, according to the Bureau of Reclamation, and feeds farms, cities, industry, wildlife and hydroelectric producers across the region. Dozens of Native American tribes and two Mexican states also depend on it.
Last winter saw the worst snowpack on record for the Colorado River Basin, adding new stress to an already fragile system. Years of overuse, prolonged drought and rising temperatures tied to climate change have drained the river's two largest reservoirs. Lake Mead recently fell to its lowest level since it began filling nine decades ago, and Lake Powell reached its own record low about a week later. Their combined storage is the lowest in nearly seven decades.
If Lake Powell falls just 33 more feet, it will be too low to generate hydroelectric power, and water could no longer be moved through the dam into the Colorado River.
The reductions are meant to steady the system while the seven basin states continue battling over the river's long-term rules. The current operating rules expire in October, and the states have not been able to agree on what replaces them. The new two-year cuts are widely seen as a bridge, not a final answer.
Arizona negotiators thanked California and Nevada for cooperating on the shared cutbacks. Tom Buschatzke, director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources, said the reductions, now formally set for 2027 and 2028, should provide a measure of certainty in the near term.
“For 2027 and 2028, the reductions that are now memorialized here will provide substantial stability for folks,” he said. “We'll continue to negotiate and figure out how we're going to operate over a longer-term period, which is what we all want.”
JB Hamby, California's chief Colorado River negotiator, called the plan “some badly needed near-term certainty at a moment of extraordinary risk,” but added that it is “a bridge, not a permanent solution.”
Nevada officials said they welcomed the collaboration with Arizona and California and repeated their preference for a seven-state consensus approach to the river's future.
In Southern Nevada, the consequences of the river's decline are already showing up in plans for growth. Kyle Roerink, senior adviser at the conservation group Great Basin Water Network, said efforts to build a new airport and shopping malls, along with some public land sales, have not progressed, reflecting the dire hydrology laid out in the federal documents. Further cuts, he said, could slow real estate development in the Las Vegas Valley.
“When the Hoover Dam, a symbol of American fortitude and American power, drops and loses its shine, it can be scary,” Roerink said. “But it can also pose itself as a great opportunity for us to prepare for the next hundred years in a meaningful way.”