Three Colorado River states face mandatory water cuts as Lake Mead and Lake Powell hit record lows
The Department of the Interior on Friday released a new two-year operating plan for the Colorado River that will force Arizona, California and Nevada to sharply reduce how much water they take from the shrinking system. The long-awaited directive comes after years of talks among seven Western states failed to produce a consensus, and as Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the river's two biggest reservoirs and a linchpin for water and electricity across the Southwest, have fallen to record lows.
The plan is the first installment of a 10-year operating framework published by the US Bureau of Reclamation in July. That framework called for reductions to be set every two years, and the new guidelines cover the first of those periods, with cuts for the lower basin states in effect through 2028.
Under the plan, Arizona will take the steepest cut at 760,000 acre-feet. California will lose 440,000 acre-feet, and Nevada 50,000 acre-feet. An acre-foot is roughly enough water to serve one to two households for a year. No mandatory reductions were imposed on the upper basin states of Utah, Colorado, Wyoming and New Mexico.
Those cuts amount to about a 27% reduction for Arizona, 10% for California and 16% for Nevada, according to Sarah Porter, director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University. She said Arizona's Colorado River water users will feel the impact even more sharply, with a 50% cut to their supplies.
Arizona officials signaled they could live with the outcome. Tom Buschatzke, director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources, said the plan accounts for earlier recommendations from the lower basin states. “It could have been draconian,” he told CNN. “I would like the reductions for Arizona to be zero, but that's not the reality we're facing. It's a pretty good outcome.”
Arizona's Democratic senators, Ruben Gallego and Mark Kelly, issued a joint statement supporting the guidelines. Nevada and California were less enthusiastic, with officials in both states saying the plan does too little to force the upper basin to share the burden.
Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo said the federal plan “provides little certainty” for his state and called it “sacrificing the health and safety of Nevadans” before requiring equal water responsibility from the upper basin. In California, Shivaji Deshmukh, general manager of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, said the state's agricultural and urban water users will work to meet the reductions, but he also stressed that all seven basin states must eventually reach a longer-term deal with deeper reductions.
The Colorado River supplies about 40 million people and irrigates more than 5 million acres of farmland across the Southwest. But more than two decades of drought, intensified by rising temperatures and chronic overuse, have shrunk the river dramatically. Lake Mead is now lower than at any point since it was created in the 1930s, and Lake Powell hit a record low on Aug. 15.
Porter called the conditions “a dramatic signal that the system is at risk of crashing, meaning reservoir levels so low that water cannot be delivered from them.”
The current crisis has deep roots. The 1922 Colorado River Compact apportioned 7.5 million acre-feet each to the upper and lower basins, a calculation based on an era of heavier snowpack and far fewer people. That framework no longer matches the region's climate or its demands, and the seven states have spent years trying, and failing, to agree on how to split a shrinking supply.
The lower basin states, which have historically drawn the most water to support large cities and agriculture, have offered cuts but want the upper basin to participate. The upper basin states argue that drought has already reduced the water available to them and that the lower basin, as the larger consumer, should bear the brunt.
Friday's two-year guidelines are an interim measure, not a final settlement. They set the stage for another round of reductions after 2028 and leave room for the seven states to keep negotiating a broader agreement that could replace the federal plan. Celene Hawkins, director of the Colorado River Program at the Nature Conservancy, said a consensus is essential for managing a river that is likely to be permanently hotter and drier in the years ahead.
Hawkins also acknowledged that a legal fight may be coming. “We definitely have seen some indications that some of the basin states are preparing for litigation,” she said. Nevada has hinted at the same response; Southern Nevada Water Authority General Manager John Entsminger said his state will “fight to protect” its water supply in the absence of science-based reductions from all seven states.
Arizona, despite its relatively positive reaction, has not ruled out legal action. Last month the Arizona Department of Water Resources called the proposed reductions in the 10-year framework “unacceptable,” saying they would devastate the state's water users and economy. Any lawsuit could take years to resolve, leaving the Colorado River in a perilous position in the meantime.
Deshmukh captured that anxiety in his statement: “Renegotiating these issues every year means we could be one dry year away from crisis and one legal battle away from system failure.”
The new plan buys time, but it does not end the underlying conflict over a river that no longer has enough water to satisfy every claim. The next two years will test whether the states can find common ground before the courts, or the weather, force the issue.